Replacing carpet on a 458 Italia

It depends on what you consider a big job. I have replaced carpet before, and you do need to pretty much remove the entire interior (except dash and with some cars the Console can stay in though usually it needs to be loosened). I don't know what the parts would cost but it can be done in less than a day, if you know what you are doing.

 

I'd say just wait. There are like 15,000 of them out there. One that ticks all the boxes will come up, unless you want lime green carpet!

 

Yeah, as Morrie points out above, it depends on what you consider a big job

If you happen to own an upholstery shop, then no big deal...

I've removed enough of the 458 interior to tell you it's not exactly a fun afternoon job. Also, the problem you are going to quickly run into isn't so much taking everything apart, but rather sourcing all the formed carpet stuff to put back in. It's not exactly like Ferrari just takes a big sheet of cut pile carpeting and tosses is across the floor. Most of the interior pieces are formed and covered and/or they are molded.

If you want to have some fun, just try taking off that little part that goes around the center frame section in your car sometime (the part just below the radio area). It's a complex little cardboard thing with some sort of fuzzy carpet bonded on top of it. So even if you buy different color carpet, what are you going to do when it comes to a part like that? You'll have to make it from scratch. So it's not like you can just order up a big section of carpet material from some company like ACC and start gluing it down. It's a lot more work than I think you are expecting.

Here's a video, which I was just watching the other night. If you skip forward a little, you can see he strips down the interior of a 488 (basically the same design as the 458) to clean it from flooding:



I currently have my 1990 Toyota Pickup stripped down - and I'm replacing the carpet in it - and it's quite a bit of work. Again, it's not really a situation where you can just take a 6 x 8 foot section of fabric and start gluing. On my Toyota, for example, my aftermarket carpet was produced by form molding it to a factory floor pan. The carpet is backed with a rubber sheet, which is pressed into the shape of the floor pan, then cured under heat.

Hang on, let me go snap a few photos...

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So, in that last photo there, you can see the carpet is loop, but it's bonded to a rubber backing, which is form molded to perfectly follow the contours of the Toyota pickup's floor pan. That's important, because if you look in the top photo, you can see where the carpet has to go up and over some of the body pan where the seats bolt down. It's not impossible to just glue down raw carpet, but it quickly becomes a hassle. Not Ferrari approved haha.

So again, it just depends on your definition of a "big job".

The other thing is sometimes the tabs holding things down snap when you go to remove them. A lot of them are more or less one-way sort of deals, because the factory isn't really expecting people to totally disassemble their cars. A good example of this is the little plastic snaps which hold some of the interior panels in. On my 458, for example, I purchased it used. The dealer I purchased it from had previously sent the car out for one of the prior customers, in order to have a radar detector installed. And by "sent out" I mean "handed the car over to a bunch of monkeys at a local stereo shop". In going over the car, I quickly noticed that one of the rear panels wasn't properly secured in place; it was just sort of half attached and loose, but evidentially nobody ever noticed.

I noticed it, when I was removing the wiring for the radar detector.

So when I went to re-install the interior panel, I had a heck of a time. It just refused to pop back into place, no matter what I did. I finally had to totally remove it to see what exactly was wrong. Turns out, someone had just tried to smash it back into place, fracturing the little plastic clip thing in the process. Getting the correct Ferrari clip took about a week. I first visited several local upholstery shops, but couldn't quite find the exact match. I finally just had to fork over the money to Ferrari and order it as I remember. Or perhaps the dealership who sold the car was nice enough to send me a few of them for free. I don't recall exactly, but after finally getting the proper part, it was still a nightmare to reattach that panel. It took me north of 45 minutes to get it back into place correctly and seated properly. I could start to see why someone at the previous shop just gave up and returned the car to the dealer with it hanging; they probably would have lost money on the job if they paid their guys to sit there for an hour trying to get those clips back into place just perfectly.

If you do end up taking out your entire interior - which I don't recommend unless you are fairly mechanically competent and have worked on a number of previous projects in the past - you will quickly run into situations that make you say, "why in the F did the factory design it like this???" - in fact, if you want to see a first hand example of this, just watch my video below where I go through installing the Braille battery into my 488:



Clearly, the methods Ferrari uses to put the car together and hold it together are not designed with speed an efficiency in mind. How those guys on the production line get the cars together in time is beyond me. Some of the crazy things you run into when taking the car apart just make you scratch your head and say "why?".

Much easier to just search until you find a car that rolled off the assembly line in the color you want.

Ray

 

Hard , no . Expensive yes if you buy all the Ferrari parts. IMO things like this , find another car or live with the colour. After market with a custom upholstery place cheaper but how much will it be moulded unless they make moulds , then its dearer . Stick to OEM especially if the parts are available

 

Like Ray showed you, it can be a big job if you don't know what you are doing. Anytime you take a car a part there is always the chance that you may end up with noises that were not there before you took it apart. I tend to agree, if you cannot live with the carpet, find another car.