New York man finds an abandoned Ferrari gathering dust in a parking lot. He gets curious and starts to investigate: ‘She deserves better’

A New York man saw a silver 2004 Ferrari F430 sitting unused in a New York City parking lot for years, with a temporary North Carolina tag, and started asking questions. Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, the television host known for the documentary Catfish and MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show, said in a TikTok video that the car appeared abandoned in his neighborhood. He said it had been sitting there long enough that the elements were starting to take a toll on it.

In the video, Schulman said someone had bought the Ferrari, which he described as worth around a quarter of a million dollars, shipped it from North Carolina to New York City, parked it, and never drove it. He called the car a 500-horsepower naturally aspirated V8 Italian masterpiece that was meant to be driven rather than left outside to slowly deteriorate.

Schulman said he bought a car cover because he could not stand watching the vehicle get destroyed, and he covered it while asking viewers who owned it and why it had sat unused. Schulman wrote in the caption that “She deserves better” and asked people to send information to the Instagram account @modernclassics or to Ferrari. He said he did not want to overstep or mess with someone else’s property but wanted to know the story behind the car.

The owner explains the Ferrari’s history after Schulman finds him

In a follow-up TikTok video, Schulman said his first post went viral and his inbox filled with messages from people asking about the car, offering to detail it, and claiming to be the owner. He said many of those messages turned out to be false and that he was “getting carphished.” 

Schulman said he then went to the building where the car was parked and started buzzing apartments one by one until he reached the actual owner on the intercom. Surprise problems like this are why many shoppers learn to spot a too-good-to-be-true Camaro deal before paying.

Schulman said he asked the owner for permission to have the car cleaned and detailed for a second video, and the owner replied that it was fine. After texting back and forth for a few days, Schulman said he learned the real story. He said the car had been converted to a manual transmission by a shop in North Carolina, but the transmission failed shortly after it was purchased and driven.

Schulman said the owner parked the Ferrari with plans to send it all the way to Texas to the place that makes the manual swap kit. He said personal matters got in the way and the car sat, and by the time the owner was ready to have it towed, the brakes had seized. Schulman said that between work, life, and everything else going on, getting the car fixed kept falling further and further down the owner’s list.

Schulman said the owner is “super mysterious” and has a bunch of other cars, so the full reasons the Ferrari sat unused may never be known. He said the owner then asked if Schulman wanted to try to get the car fixed, left the key in the vehicle, and essentially said, “Do whatever you think is best.”

Schulman said he took that as a challenge even though he had never met the owner in person. He said the battery was completely dead after the car had sat for 18 months, so he removed it, took it to an AutoZone store, and installed a new one.

Schulman said the oil looked good, and when he turned the key and pressed the start button, the Ferrari started after sitting abandoned on the streets of Brooklyn for a year and a half. He said getting the engine running was a good start, but the car still has a transmission problem, and he asked viewers for help finding a Ferrari specialist or shop that knows their way around an F430.

Viewers who saw the first video offered a mix of concerns and suggestions. One commenter worried the attention might put the car at risk, writing, “Its probably gone and stolen now cuz of this video.” Another raised doubts about the cover itself, saying, “The car cover is going to destroy the paint.”

A third suggested a more formal route, writing, “Take the vin number and contact a Ferrari dealership, they will know if money is owed on a lease and or sale. If not you can request a change of ownership/ abandoned auto file with the company.” One simply replied, “Buy it.”