Wow, that dash is superhightech.

Sweet.

What if you suddenly claim you unknowingly bought a fake just to hide your exceedingly bad taste?

And with that "V4 engine" (from the WSJ article) under"hood", you're already halfway there to a morsel of Maranello mistiness.

man if your dumb enough to buy one of these....

Wow, according to this article the Fiero had V4. That's news to me.

Unique Performance rises from the ashes .........

...I'd pay $500 for one and enter it in the next LeMons competition.

How many deaf and legally-blind Italians have the $30K in cash lying around to buy one of these things? Wouldn't just the act of starting one up be a dead give away?

I would love to be a fly on the wall in my local PepBoys when some asshat who bought one of these insisted that Ferrari made a 2.5l 4cyl.

Ferrarinstein.

You know, the Yellow one doesn't look 1/2 bad. If it was labeled a Fiero instead of a Ferrari, (and was thus less than $10,000) I could see myself driving it. Really... Stop laughing...

Tee hee.

They don't try to say that they were passing them off to customers as the real deal.

I love the stat about lost sales. I believe that has to assume that everyone who bought a kit car would have bought a real Ferrari if the kits didn't exist.

You know, you can pick up a real 308 GTS for about the same price.

Anybody interested in knowing how to spot a counterfeit Channel handbag?

"Seems these upstanding fellows thought slapping some kit car bodies onto the delightful chassis of GM's famed Fiero was a great idea, and attempted to them of off one of Italy's most famous exports."

Wha...?

Wait.. I assumed the customers were being defrauded and told they were buying a real Ferrari, but apparently they were told it was a replica. I guess it's illegal to sell a replica Ferrari in Italy?

It's questionable taste, to be sure, but for it to be illegal seems odd to me.

At the pace of the current "auto branding adventures", how much longer can it be before we'll be able to buy officially licensed Ferrari accessories for Fieros?

I don't think their customers who confused this with the real thing. It's the same swap-meet chic of a $15 Rolex or a $10 Burberry scarf.

@dculberson: Yeah... I ....don't....understand.....either.

Not really replicas, the proportions are too utterly wrong and hilarious to be replicas, and consequently, how can they be fakes?

Like arresting My Chemical Romance for being a fake Green Day.

Grammar FTL.

You know some day original Fieros will be collectable and there will be a whole industry centered around redoing all these re-bodied hoonsters. Time to start stocking up on RIM body panels!

Am I the only one completely floored that there were any Fieros in Italy in the first place? I mean, um...huh??

The point, *I think*, is that Ferrari didn't allow the use of their name on the knockoffs, so it was Ferrari that was harmed. I can't imagine that the builders presented the cars as real, or that any buyer would have accepted it as real, so there was no harm to the buyer. This is different from Unique Performance where the builder, buyer, and Caroll Shelby all knew the cars were replicas.

Of course, at least the buyers of the fake Ferraris actually got cars...minor details.

@beercheck: That's a good point. When I see a Fiero based replica in the UK (there are a suprising number about), I think to myself;

"God, I wish that still looked like a Fiero..."

Back when I was rocking an '86 Cavalier Z-24 Hatchback (hen's teeth baby!) I'd have traded my left nut for one of those red fiero intake manifolds.

Now it just makes me a little sad that it would have "upgraded" my 2.8 v6 to 140 hp.

This is only going to boost the ego of the vibrant Fiero Owner Club in my nieghborhood that clogs up all the car shows.

Like they needed another reason to justify thier '80's detachable below average length pecker was actually "unique and valuable performance machine"

Ferrari logos on GM products make Baby Jesus cry.

I guess that the actual issue was the use of Ferrari logos (however unlikely they would be to fool anyone). The scary thing is how badly written and researched the WSJ article is. My cat would have probably been able to produce something more informative.

The article claimed the company made 6000, yes six thousand cars a year. Where you gonna find 6000 Fieros anywhere? Maybe Doug Hastings has a cousin in France...

@htrodblder:
Do those shop pictures look like they could put out twenty of ANYTHING per day ... let alone automobiles?

@htrodblder: The writer was talking about the real Ferrari company not the kit car guys...

Who knows maybe laws on copyrights and intellectual property are different in EU/ Italy so that what these cats were doing was really illegal.

" A real Ferrari?! Be still my racing heart!" Paraphrased from "Cars"

@Smitty: @htrodblder: The context of that paragraph tells me that the 6000 is referring to Ferrari's output, not the "counterfeiter".

@smalleyxb122: I see econobiker beat me to that one.

I'm from Italy...this happens quite often lately, because Ferrari doesn't like who sells a "fake" or a "replica" or an "ugly-fake-fiero-based-replica" car with a Ferrari badge on, especially within the Italian market.
BTW I think it's quite stupid, as the kit-cars or replica-cars market is very small in Italy. Here they actually sell much more Ferraris than kits. (Italy is usually Ferrari's 4th biggest market in the world).
The cars the article is referring to are usual Fiero-based kit cars, sold as kit cars (only an idiot would think they were the real thing) for an average 20k Euros. Normal kit cars as there are plenty of them in the US. In this case they found 21 cars, on all the Italian territory, involving a dozen of dealers/coachbuilders.
Think that In Italy (and Europe) cars are more expensive than in the US.
Just an example to make you understand how unlucky we are: you can find used Mustangs V6 2005 for sale at 22000 Euro (it equals to $ 36000 at todays low dollar/high euro exchange rate).
As I was saying, Ferrari is becoming more and more aggressive on this matter, especially on the Italian market, with the collaboration of the "Guardia di Finanza", which is a sort of Police+IRS+army mix.
They even chase private people: a few months ago an Italian man bought a cheap Fiero-based F355 kit car on ebay in the USA, he paid the car (somethink like $15000) and he shipped it here via container. When the car was being unloaded at the port somebody noticed it was not a real Ferrari, the same day the Guardia di Finanza seized the car, and Ferrari suited the unlucky man.

Genuine Fauxrraris

So, who's going to break the news to the Italians that the Miami Vice Daytona was really a Corvette?

@Feds: The 2.8 v6 was such a sad engine. It was even anemic in my little s10 with a 5-speed.

@dculberson: I dub thee "Wrong".

According to this article in the Guardian, the "gang" used Mercs and Toyotas as well...

"None of the engines was made by Ferrari, but the gang used internet hobbyists' sites to accumulate visible parts that were genuine. These included dashboards, steering wheels and, of course, the Big Red's distinctive black and yellow badge."

Another fine example of BAD COTOMER SEVIS!

[www.guardian.co.uk]

Jalopnik... Read.
These are images they found of ferrari replicas, not photos of the ACTUAL replicas. i.e. google searched photos. Don't spread misinformation!

@milo_carrera: Yeah, I think this is being misreported as fraud when it's actually under Italy's branding laws. Which isn't quite the same thing. There was a case a couple of years ago where some beautiful hand-built replica Maseratis were destroyed under the same legislation. These were the sort of mout-watering cars you could see racing at Goodwood or Classic Le Mans, proper alloy-bodied recreations of georgeous historic vehicles using incredibly rare original parts (I think one of them had one of two remaining gearboxes of this type in the world).

Crushed, because a judge ruled that they were the same as knock-off Gucci handbags. The story went that the crane operator at the scrapyard refused to destroy them so someone else stepped into do the deed...

@dculberson:

Of all the things I could hate GM for, Their greatest crime is foisting the terrible fart-in-a-gymnasium exhaust note of those 60° v-6's on an unsuspecting public.

@Feds: They always seemed loudest on the Celebrity. Generally because exhausts leaks were almost impossible to stop.

@Pinto: With the genuine Goodwrench everything underbody (engine, underpinnings, and other underwear...) -&- to avoid the Ferrari trademark...

...shouldn't the name be "Feckcari"?

For crying out loud... I could take one look at the wheels and front lights of that "328 GTB" and can easily tell that it's a Fiero kit car... and I'm not a Ferrari expert.

These kit cars aren't even close to being 'duplicates'.

Their government is really screwed up going after these guys but they can't go after the mafia that are causing the Naples garbage crisis.

And I'm not sure who is the bigger group of idiots in all of this... the Italian police (for shutting these guys down for their Ferrari non-copies) or the Wall Street Journal for:
1. thinking this is news
2. demonstrating they don't know even a tiny bit about what real Ferraris look like or what model is what

The reason WSJ picked it up is twofold, one, it's now run by Rupert Murdoch, so they want eye grabbing stories with headlines that sell (like the word Ferrari in the title). And the second is the reporter. She's a junior reporter who mostly does fashion and celeb stories, and is familiar with Italy. She's covered fake Gucci bags before so she THINKS she knows something about cheap knock off's.
Her name is Rosamaria Mancini (rosamaria.mancini@dowjones.com, I'm going to send her a note asking her to learn about the other side of the story.), here's an index of stories she has done: [findarticles.com]
and here's a video story she did recently: [www.brightcove.tv]
This is WSJ quality reporting??? It plays like a college freshman marketing major's submission for a class.

Basically rather than do some reporting and some research, maybe discover that there is a huge community of replica owners of all kinds of cars, she basically did a press release in the WSJ for the Italian tax police. To me she is just collecting a paycheck and not informing the public. The tax police are working hard to sell a few enthusiasts building replicas as a "counterfeit ring" because it gets them good press. She SHOULD have gotten both sides of the story.. that's reporting... this is posting a press release for the prosecutor who gave her his side.
Chelle