The Celebrity Car Ban Rumors Explained

Having a celebrity pictured with your car can be a great source of free publicity for an automaker. However, not all publicity is of the good sort –- headlines about famous faces crashing cars, tackily modifying them, or flipping them for profit are not exactly great advertisements for the brand. There are lots of rumors out there about how car companies go about dealing with troublesome owners, with the idea of a so-called blacklist being one of the most persistent.

Ferrari is most infamous for its alleged blacklisted celebs, but other carmakers, from Bugatti to Ford, are also said to have banned certain individuals from stepping foot in their showrooms again. It's tricky to verify if there's any truth to these rumors, especially since no automakers have ever gone on record to explicitly confirm or deny the existence of such lists. That said, plenty of brands have tried new tactics in recent years to exert more control over who gets to own their most exclusive cars, even if they've stopped short of issuing outright bans.

The reality is that banning someone from owning any car from a certain brand is practically impossible. Even if an automaker was to send all of its authorized dealers an official blacklist, a banned celeb could still purchase cars under the names of associates or assistants or simply lease them from a third-party dealer. Then there's the used market to consider– there are plenty of relatively new supercars in the hands of non-franchised dealerships, and there's no feasible way for an automaker to enforce selling restrictions on all of them.

Even if the brand somehow managed to get over all of those hurdles, it's still possible that a supposedly banned celeb could borrow a friend's car, be pictured driving it, and still generate unwanted headlines. For all these reasons, it's not possible for even an automaker as PR-sensitive as Ferrari to enforce a blanket ban on any one individual. However, that's not to say that Maranello's finest can't control who gets to own its most exclusive cars.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given its reputation, Ferrari is known to be the most litigious of all high-end carmakers, although it's far from the only company to enforce its rules through the legal system. One of the most infamous Ferrari legal threats was against the EDM producer Deadmau5, whose custom-wrapped "Purrari" with a bright Nyan Cat design earned him a cease and desist letter from the brand. He complied and sold the 458 Spider shortly after without its distinctive wrap, but other accused celebs haven't backed down so easily.

After objecting to the use of its cars in a 2018 runway show, Ferrari launched a lawsuit against fashion designer Philipp Plein, which it eventually won. In the suit, the automaker also claimed that Plein's display of his personal Ferrari collection alongside his clothing line on Instagram was "unlawfully appropriating the goodwill" associated with its cars. However, it seems the animosity between the two parties didn't affect Plein's ability to get behind the wheel of desirable new Ferraris, as he was seen in an SF90 Stradale less than a year after the original verdict was delivered.

While celebrities are generally safe from being banned by a certain manufacturer even if they generate bad press, the same cannot be said for journalists. By now, it should be no surprise to find out that Ferrari is one of the pickiest manufacturers about who gets to review its cars, as Chris Harris found out when he published a scathing article in Jalopnik in 2011. He took issue with the fact that Ferrari would allegedly tune its press cars to deliver more power and superior handling than customer cars, sometimes even demanding to know the track a magazine would take the car to for testing to ensure it was optimally set up.

This ensured that journalists would only ever write glowing reviews about Ferraris, while every other rival car was left at a disadvantage in comparison. Ferrari eventually responded and denied the allegations but banned Harris from receiving press cars in retaliation. 

Ironically, he forced the brand to reconcile by proving he could acquire press cars even without Ferrari's approval, stating in a 2013 review for The Drive that "This [458 Italia] belongs to Ferrari and I'm probably not supposed to be driving it, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Someone kind of subcontracted it to me, let's say." It was later reported that the someone in question was Jeremy Clarkson, although this was never confirmed. Harris has since tested several more Ferraris, so it seems his defiant stance saw him removed from the blacklist.

It's not just individual sellers that cause for carmakers — dealership price gouging is also a serious issue for sought-after models and one that affects a lot more buyers, too. Dodge's limited models like the SRT Demon saw huge demand at release, and to combat dealerships adding huge markups to each car, the Dodge promised to prioritize production for SRT Demons sold at MSRP or below.

More recently, the Ford F-150 Lightning was also subject to eye-watering markups, with one sporting a $69,000 premium over its MSRP. Dealers were also caught selling demonstration models which were supposed to be retained for test drives only, with Ford intervening and speaking to dealers individually once the problems were publicized in the media.

There's a good reason why brands are so keen to discourage greedy dealers –- research conducted by GfK Automobility showed that paying over MSRP seriously impacted a buyer's perception of a brand and nearly tripled the likelihood that they'd never buy from the same brand again. That could make a much more significant impact on a brand's bottom line than any bad publicity from an unruly famous face ever could, and so most brands take these issues much more seriously than any supposed celebrity bans.