He Bought a Flooded Car, Thought It Was a Bargain, Turns Out It's a Bummer!

For Jeffrey and Christian from JR Garage, things started going south soon after they bought the Maserati GranTurismo with a salvage title. They knew it didn’'t run, it didn't drive and it was basically… flooded.

But hey, they thought they knew what they were doing because, with over one hundred cars bought, fixed, and sold for the past few years, the two brothers owning JR Garage only lost money on the BMW M3 E93.

Little did they know at the time that a Maserati GranTurismo would make a huge financial hole in their budget. "It's been nothing but a headache, after headache, after headache," Jeffrey says, warning everyone to think twice before buying a salvage, flooded car.

Widely known for unreliability when dry, the Maserati GranTurismo was way worse when wet. The latest of the issues was the ZF-sourced six-speed automatic transmission blowing up. However, their relationship started as love at first sight. He saw it and just had to have it. It's called "coupe de foudre," because you need French words to describe naivety sometimes.

The car JR Garage bought at the salvage auction is a facelifted 2018 Maserati GranTurismo with a gorgeous spec: it is painted in a sort of gunmetal gray over a red leather interior with a carbon fiber steering wheel.

The Maserati they bought was the victim of Hurricane Ida, which was the second-most damaging hurricane to ever make landfall in the state of Louisiana, with Hurricane Katrina from 2005 in the tragic lead.

It doesn't run, it doesn't drive, it just blows up

The car didn't run and drive, the mileage was unknown, and it had suffered mechanical damage. Among many others. Back then, it was only two and a half years old. So, what could go wrong?

Jeffrey from JR Garage bought it for $32,000 and trailered it to the garage to have it fixed. The GranTurismo would originally cost $150,000. Jeff thought he made the deal of his life, but little did he know that the car was a mess.

Furthermore, he made the biggest mistake that he could make with a flooded car. He decided to jump-start it, even though it was still full of water. Washing it and replacing the battery and the oil would have been a much better choice. But he just didn't have the necessary patience back then.

Disaster struck. It was the beginning of the end. Two days after driving the car for 30 miles, while cruising down the highway at 65 mph, the 4.7-liter V8 engine blew up, and the Maserati GranTurismo was on fire.

Before it went up in flames, that V8 could pump out 454 horsepower and 384 pound-feet of torque and hit 60 mph (97 kph) from a standstill in just 4.5 seconds. The needle of the odometer went all the way to 185 mph. But that all blew up within seconds.

Jeffrey and Christian decided to have that engine replaced with one they found on eBay for only $4,500, taking their total expenses up to $47,000. And it was far from over. A month of driving later, the transmission blew up, too. "It grenaded itself," Jeffrey says.

Where there is a will, there is a... cheaper way

Burned orange fluid filled with metal shavings. That is what the Maserati dealership found in the transmission. So that explains why it wouldn't even go into gear: every single one of them was chewed up. That would be a $30,000 repair. The warranty would not cover the damage because the car was flooded.

He and his brother Christian started calling shops that would be able to fix the transmission. None of them wanted to hear about it when they found out that it was a flooded car. They finally took it to a transmission specialist, who told them the bill would be $22,951. But there were more problems, which were not cheap at all. So, he is inches away from selling the Maserati for parts because fixing it is more expensive than they paid for the whole car.

But they got too far to turn around. They eventually found a transmission online, coming from a 2018 Maserati GranTurismo, costing $1,750. The shop that sold the transmission actually made it work for less than $4,000, so Jeffrey did not need a trailer to pick up the car.

Now the GranTurismo works flawlessly and it's not going to be the financial hole that they were bracing for because they are selling it for $41,000. But well, as they said in the first place: "Never buy a flooded exotic!"