Ferrari 296 GTS Sells at a $130K Loss After Just 1,300 MilesDepreciation is the tax nobody at the Ferrari dealership brings up while you're signing paperwork. Most of the time the bill arrives quietly, spread over years, easy to ignore if you don't look at values. Every so often it arrives all at once, in a single auction result, large enough that it's worth stopping to stare at. This is one of those.Check This Out: Best Dash Cams of 2026: How to Choose the Right One for Your VehicleA 2025 Ferrari 296 GTS with roughly 1,300 miles on the clock crossed the block on Bring a Trailer and sold for $373,500 on May 26. On its own, that's just another well-optioned exotic changing hands. The gut-punch is the window sticker that came with it: new, the car rang up at $504,308. Subtract the two and the first owner walked away $130,808 lighter, having covered about the distance from Atlanta to Chicago. That works out to a little over $100 in depreciation for every single mile the car turned. You could drive a nicely equipped Miata into a lake every 1,300 miles and come out roughly even.What actually soldWorth knowing what the car is before we bury the guy who sold it. The 296 GTS is the retractable-hardtop version of the 296 GTB, and the badge isn't marketing filler — Ferrari names it for the 2,992 cc displacement and six cylinders. Under the deck sits a 120-degree twin-turbo V6 making 663 cv on combustion alone, paired with an F1-derived MGU-K electric motor worth another 167 cv, for a combined 830 cv — 819 horsepower in American money. It's rear-wheel drive, runs an eight-speed dual-clutch, carries a 7.45 kWh battery good for around 15 electric-only miles, and drops its folding hardtop in about 14 seconds. The GTS weighs roughly 154 pounds more than the GTB thanks to chassis reinforcement, but Ferrari quotes identical performance: a genuine sub-three-second car.AdvertisementAdvertisementSo this wasn't a lemon or a salvage-title horror story. It was a nearly new, mechanically perfect supercar with delivery miles.The options trapHere's the part that should make anyone with a configurator open in another tab wince. This car left Maranello loaded — around $131,000 in options on top of the base price. The Tricolore livery, carbon and red vinyl accents, 20-inch wheels, red calipers over cross-drilled carbon-ceramic rotors, the front-axle lift, Scuderia fender shields, a carbon steering wheel with shift lights, Rosso bucket seats, JBL audio, the whole catalog.Options are where exotics hemorrhage money fastest. A buyer will pay for the badge, the miles, and the color they wanted — they will not reimburse you for the $131,000 you spent making the car exactly yours. The used market recovered pennies on that spend, because the second owner is shopping on price and mileage, not on how much carbon fiber the first owner talked himself into.Was this actually a disaster, or just a Ferrari?Depends on your reference point. Measured against what the seller paid, it's brutal. Measured against the market, it's ordinary. Classic.com puts the average 296 GTS sale price around $390,000, with recorded sales dipping to $248,600 and the broader 296 line topping out near $595,000. A $373,500 result lands just under the average. The car sold for what a 296 GTS sells for. The only "loss" is the gap between market reality and the fantasy figure on the original invoice.Related ArticlesAdvertisementAdvertisementBest Prime Day Deals for Off-Roaders (2026)Land Rover Just Stop-Sale'd The Defender, Discovery, And Range Rover All At Once Over A Mystery Airbag ProblemAnd here's the detail that reframes the whole thing: a 2026 296 GTS starts around $373,000 new. A one-year-old, heavily optioned, barely driven example sold for essentially the price of a stripped base car that hasn't been built yet. The buyer got $131,000 of options thrown in for free and skipped the wait.None of this is newFerrari values follow a rule that's boring but dependable. Limited-run halo cars — 288 GTO, F40, F50, LaFerrari — appreciate because Ferrari deliberately starves the supply. Series-production cars — 355, 360, 458, 488, F8, and now the 296 — depreciate hard for the first few years and then flatten out. Maranello will build as many 296s as the order book wants, and abundant supply is the enemy of resale value. Layer on the lingering enthusiast grumbling about a V6 wearing the Prancing Horse (never mind that 663 cv from three liters is a production specific-output record, so that argument is really a fight with physics), and early depreciation was baked in from the launch event.What owners and buyers should take from thisIf you want a 296 GTS, this is the entire case for buying used. Let someone else eat the first year and the option markup, then pick up a low-mileage car near market average. The "buy new, flip in twelve months" playbook only pays out on allocation-limited specials — try it on a series car and the market hands you a $130,000 lesson.AdvertisementAdvertisementThere's a financing angle too. Put a car like this on a loan and depreciation this steep can drop you into negative equity fast, where you owe more than the car's worth. Gap coverage stops existing right when you'd want it. And if you're insuring one, an agreed-value policy is worth the conversation, because a stated-value payout on a rapidly depreciating exotic can leave you arguing with an adjuster over a number that's already moved. Related ArticlesRivian Owners Say They Were Promised Self-Driving Trucks That Were Never Coming, Now There's a LawsuitBest Portable Air Compressors for Airing Up After the Trail (Tested & Ranked)Then there's the cost of simply owning it — annual service, carbon-ceramic brakes that aren't cheap when they finally wear, tires that erase themselves, and a hybrid battery pack that's a warranty item today and an open question a decade out.Read Next: The 10 Best Outdoor Knives of 2026: Top-Rated Picks for Hunting, Camping, and SurvivalAdvertisementAdvertisementWhoever bought this 296 GTS got the better end of the deal, and it wasn't close. The seller paid supercar prices for the privilege of being the first name on the title. That privilege, it turns out, costs about a hundred bucks a mile.Images Via: Ferrari
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