For the first time ever, consumers are beginning to feel that fast vehicles are becoming pointless. There are other reasons, too, why consumers might not want to buy a 599. When the 599 was being test driven it was at night and it was raining so hard that you couldn’t see anything.
Unfortunately the 599 was hopeless. Its automatic wipers couldn’t cope, either not working at all or scraping themselves noisily over a bone-dry screen. The headlights had absolutely no power. The heater wouldn’t heat and the air-conditioning wouldn’t chill.
Ferrari may have designed the 599 to be a comfortable long-distance cruiser. They may have thought hard about making it a usable everyday car, but it was immediately obvious that they’d failed completely. It’d have been easier to circumnavigate the Arc de Triomphe in a rickshaw.