Kids Scratched A $764,000 Ferrari And The Parents Offered $1000

There are bad days to own a Ferrari. Then there is coming home from a business trip to find out your $764,000 AUD supercar has been used as a playground.

That is what happened to a Ferrari 488 GTB owner in Kunming, China, after four young boys decided the parked red supercar outside looked like something worth climbing.

Surveillance footage shows the children approaching the car with bamboo poles before getting onto the bodywork, sitting on the roof and using sections of the Ferrari as a slide.

For an owner who had never put a scratch on the car, it was a confronting thing to come back to. The 488 GTB cost him 3.6 million yuan (~$764,000), and the children left it with scratches across multiple panels and a cracked bumper.

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Here is where the story gets more interesting than just another expensive parking lot incident.

The owner, identified only as Zhang, could have gone straight to an authorised Ferrari repairer. That route would have cost close to 100,000 yuan (~$21,000 AUD).

Instead, because the damage was done by children and because Zhang is a father himself, he chose to use local workshops and bring the bill down to $6,300 AUD. Still a meaningful amount of money, but considerably less than what a Ferrari repair typically costs when done by the book.

He then presented the receipts during police mediation and waited to see what the parents would offer, but they came back with 5,000 yuan (~$1,061 AUD) and did not bring the children to apologise in person.

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The $1,000 offer is the part that turned a straightforward insurance headache into something people actually wanted to argue about online.

Nobody expects children to be held personally responsible for understanding what a 488 GTB costs. Kids climb things. But that’s not the real story. The difficult aspect to follow is the parents apparently declining to cover the actual repair bill after Zhang had already gone out of his way to avoid the most expensive option available to him.

He absorbed the inconvenience of local workshops specifically to make the settlement manageable, and the response was a fraction of what he actually paid.

Zhang has since prepared paperwork to sue, armed with surveillance footage, police records and itemised repair receipts. A lawyer quoted in local reporting noted that guardians can be held liable for harm caused by children who lack civil capacity, unless they can demonstrate they properly fulfilled their duty of supervision.

Whether that argument will withstand legal scrutiny is another matter. What is already clear is that the $1,000 counteroffer did not make the situation easier to walk away from. It made it considerably harder.