The Ferrari 458 owned by prominent DJ Deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) has been the cause of a lot of controversy since he purchased his car a few years ago. Dubbed by himself as the “Purrari” this 458 Italia underwent some, uh, visual changes. The Canadian electronic musician felt that, after much critical and financial success with music, that he wanted a nice supercar. However, he wanted his to be unique, and that might be the biggest understatement of the year.
For those of you that do not know, this car is based off of a popular internet meme known as Nyan cat. More info on that can be found here (warning extremely annoying). It is not clear what possessed Zimmerman to style his Ferrari off of that, however he did. Obviously the car did not come like this so to accomplish this massive visual overhaul, large decals were printed out and then put on onto the original car (which was white). Additionally all the prancing Ferrari logos were replaced with a prancing cat, in the same stye of Ferrari’s logo, and the license plate read out “PURRARI” aka the “Pink Ferrari.” This car quickly became popular on social media as it is clearly hilarious.
Ferrari, however, was not too pleased with the car. Sometime after Zimmerman “modified” his 458, the Italian formula 1 and super car company reached out and sent him a cease and desist letter. Zimmerman quickly notified his fans via Twitter and a social media debacle ensued. Apparently Ferrari is very particular about what you can do with their cars. The musician claimed that their main concern was him changing the logo. So he angrily took off all the decals and the custom work, and restored the 458 to its original condition. He then put up the vehicle for sale with an asking price of $380,000 dollars and a few people bid on it. It should be noted that a new 458 Italia started at $233,ooo. Zimmerman began to shop around for a new super car and Nissan even built a custom GT-R for him with the same decals on it. However he eventually settled on the $1 million dollar McLaren P1 hybrid-supercar, a long time enemy of Ferraris.
Photo from autoevolution.com
