Ferris Beuller's Day Off, car scene revelation

I first saw this film decades ago. Up until about 10 minutes ago I completely misunderstood the humor of the scene where Ferris and his friend try to roll back the odometer on the friend's dad's classic 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder sports car by putting the car's rear wheels up on rollers and running the car in reverse to conceal the fact that they had driven it around all day without permission. I thought the joke was that they thought that would work but odometers don't actually go backwards. I looked it up today and found out that on old cars THAT ACTUALLY WORKED. Later on, carmakers changed it so that odometers didn't do that. Nowadays they are electronic and definitely don't go backwards. However most people are not sure if odometers add mileage when the car is in reverse.
On the other hand I am sure they could have damaged the transmission by doing that.
Any thoughts?

 

Sounds like something Mythbusters must've handled.

 

I'd heard of unscrupulous used car lots that used to "roll back" the odometer on high mileage vehicles back in the 70's and 80's, but that required them "cracking" open the dashboard and physically removing the odometer and manipulating the dial(s) by hand.

I was 16 when I first saw the film in theaters, and even then I thought how stupid of an idea that was, coming from someone as relatively intelligent as Ferris.

 

would it do that on this cars odometer

 

Perhaps on a 1961 odometer it might work...would it actually work on Ferrari?

 

yep. Rolling it back with an electric drill.

 

I was just posting that when you beat me to it.... they didn't bave to crack the dash or manipulate the actual clock... there was a cable underneath the car / attached to the rear drivetrain. You simply had to disconnect the cable and attach it to the power drill... run the drill in reverse and the numbers on the odometer went backwards.

My brother rebuilt the engine in an old '64 Datsun Bluebird and he wanted it to show zero miles on the new motor... so he set up the electric drill on a jig and ran it for multiple days to get the clock all the way back to zero. Probably not entirely legal but it was for himself / wasn't selling the car... and we were stupid kids at the time.

 

I knew a guy always buying and selling cars. When ever your drove one of his car, you had to guess you speed because he'd disconnect the odometer cables so it wouldn't put mileage on them before he sold them! Lol. Shady!

 

But then again, it's a movie script.

 

I haven't seen the film in a long time and I can't remember if they had the back end of the car jacked up and the rear wheels were running in mid-air, or if the rear wheels were on some sort of rollers. Either way it couldn't have been good for the transmission or the engine!
But it probably got the job done in rolling back the mileage. All this time I thought that concept was Three Stooges style ingenuity! Of course it didn't work out for them as the car ended up crashing.

 

I've also heard of shady used car dealers (many years ago) putting saw dust in worn out transmissions...it can smooth out the clunky for a short time.

 

That is true. In real life, Rooney was very unlikely to eat it.

 

I recall seeing a 61 250 GT California Spyder for sale several years ago for crazy money....around 8 million.

 

Goodness! And they wrecked one in the movie!

 

That's what Matilda's dad did anyway.

 

"Ferris, he never drives it. He just rubs it with a diaper."

 

It was a replica. According to this Motor Trend story, one of the movie cars sold last year for $396K.

Ferris Bueller Ferrari California Spyder Replica Sells For Nearly $400,000

 

Check the opening scene of Robert Zemeckis’ “Used Cars.”

 

The car is on the jack. The jack tips when Cameron repeatedly kicks the front of the car. When the tires touch the garage floor that is when it crashes thru the back of the garage.

 

Think this trough a little bit.
The car had jack stands under the rear suspension just high enough to get the tires off the ground so they roll freely.
The car was running, in reverse, and allowed to run at a moderate rpm in an attempt to roll the numbers back on the odometer.
What about that set up is doing something the car is not designed to do?...other than remaining stationary due to the wheels being off the ground.

The potential for overheating the engine, because not enough air is moving through the radiator, exists, otherwise the rest of what is happening is well within the operational parameters of the vehicle.

As far as rolling back the mileage goes, there are a few ways to get that done.
I do not know the mechanical specifics of the Ferrari used (or the replica either) so it may have a direct mechanical cable operated speedometer, in which case it could be rolled back when reversing the direction of the speedometer cable.

Most are set up to decouple, or slip, when turning in the wrong direction.
If this is the case then direct access to the speedometer mechanism is required in order to alter the shown numbers...and there are a few different methods to get that done too.

On a side note, one of the most common, and unnoticed, methods of "lowering" indicated mileage on modern vehicles is to replace the dash gauge cluster.
The digital readouts keep the numbers in the computer so the computer would have to be swapped out to change the mileage...with some upload changes too.
If the odometer is analog, regardless of the car computers, then a swap out with a gauge reading less miles is a simple, easy method of appearing to have lower miles.
This is one of the reasons the car makers went to 6 digit odometers instead of only 5. The 6 digit odometers will read up to 999,999 miles instead of the 5 digit styles that roll over at 99,999 miles and once again read 00,000 even though it is actually 100,000 miles.

 

Somewhere, I have a photo of that car while in the staging line at B/J 2000. I don't think I saw it cross the block, but that is a pretty stout sale price.

 

Silly me, I always thought they were trying to roll it over until the numbers all went back to zero, then get it back to where it should be.

 

That reminds me of the episode of Married With Children where Al Bundy's old Dodge sedan is about to turn one million original miles. The auto company is about to award him a big expensive prize once they officially see the mileage turn from 999,999 to 000,000. Somehow that happens when they are not present to verify it so Al gets nothing.
At the end of episode we see Al driving the car down a country road, desperately trying to get to the next million miles. Haha!

 

Too soon.

 

Happened to Barney on an Andy Griffith episode