A man receives a $1 million bill from a garage, but no car

Submitting a payment request for a service that hasn’t been completed is already on the questionable side. Let alone that the request contains a number with six zeros. It happened to a man in Iowa, USA. He asked the garage to restore his 1967 Maserati Ghibli. The dispute eventually led to a lawsuit.

According to Indianapolis Star the man bought the original Ghibli in 2010 for $16,000, now about 15,000 euros. According to the garage, the work would take about one to two years and cost a total of $200,000. The garage owner turned out to be completely wrong with his assessment, because after four years the man still did not have his Maserati.

To make matters worse, he receives an invoice from the garage. The account has an amount of 1 million dollars. Indeed, five times what they had agreed upon. And the stupidity doesn’t stop there. The garage allegedly performed a complete restoration without the owner’s consent, according to the indictment.

The previous project also went wrong

The bill wasn’t just for Maserati, by the way. At the same time, the garage owner had a lucrative offer to buy an original Austin-Healey 100M. The two would buy a car and share the cost. He would have to put up $50,000 and another $10,000 for the job.

In the end, the man received a bill for 130,000 euros for Austin-Healey. It could happen, you might say, but later it turned out not to be a real 100M and the work hadn’t even been done by the garage.

The court punishes the garage

The court has decided that the owner of the Maserati Ghibli has received ‘damages’ of 2.4 million dollars. It is not clear how they arrived at that amount, but there are probably additional costs for lawyers and other side issues.

The court is of the opinion that the owner of the garage ‘deliberately and contemptuously’ disregarded the rights of the car owner. As a result, the garage now receives an invoice of $ 7.2 million on the mat. That’s actually three times the amount of 2.4 million.