Twenty years ago, a red Ferrari Enzo hit a light pole at an estimated 162 miles per hour on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, splitting in half like a cracked walnut. The driver walked away. The story became automotive legend.
Now the man behind the wheel — or, as he still insists, the passenger seat — wants his car back.
Stefan Eriksson, a Swedish national with a rap sheet that reads like a crime novel outline, has surfaced on a Facebook Ferrari group demanding the return of his wrecked Enzo. He says it was stolen from him while he sat in prison. He claims the car was shipped to Italy, rebuilt, and sold at auction in France without his knowledge or consent.
He says he was never compensated and remains the sole registered owner. The car, chassis 135564, is now worth an estimated $18 million.
Jalopnik originally broke the crash story back in 2006, with readers sending in eyewitness accounts from the scene. The wreckage photos went viral before “going viral” was even a phrase people used. A shattered supercar on PCH became one of those indelible car-culture images that never quite fades.
Eriksson’s version of events has always been creative. He told police at the scene he was merely a passenger, that a mysterious German man named “Dietrich” had been driving and fled into the hills. A videotape recovered from inside the car reportedly showed the speedometer pegged at 199 mph moments before impact, allegedly with Eriksson at the wheel.
Nobody ever found Dietrich.
The charges that followed went well beyond reckless driving. Eriksson, already a convicted felon in Sweden, was hit with embezzlement, grand theft auto, drunk driving, drug possession, and weapons charges. He faced a potential 14-year sentence but pled down to three years and agreed to deportation.
Back in Sweden, he continued collecting convictions. Aggravated assault — specifically, pouring gasoline on debt collectors — plus drug possession and driving under the influence. The man is nothing if not consistent.
Now he’s posting on “Ferrari For Sale By Owner” on Facebook, laying out a timeline of events and calling other group members “clowns” when they push back. He claims he was coerced into his plea deal under duress and that the car’s seizure amounted to theft.
The Enzo’s second life is well documented. RM Sotheby’s offered it at auction in 2016, describing it as a 2004 model originally finished in Rosso Corsa, damaged in a “road accident” in the U.S. in 2006, then rebuilt in Nero Daytona over red leather and certified by Ferrari Classiche. The listing noted just 2,500 kilometers on the odometer and called the car “virtually as-new condition.”
A diplomatic way to describe a machine that was once in two pieces on a Malibu roadside.
Civil forfeiture is a real mechanism in the American legal system, and law enforcement agencies do seize and sell property — sometimes questionably. But the gap between “the government improperly took my car” and “a multiply convicted felon ranting on Facebook deserves restitution” is roughly the width of the Pacific Coast Highway.
Whether Eriksson has any legitimate legal claim to the rebuilt Enzo is a question for attorneys, not comment sections. What’s certain is that two decades later, the story of the split Enzo still has legs. Its former owner still has audacity to spare.
An $18 million car, a man who poured gasoline on his creditors, and a phantom German driver who vanished into the Malibu hills. Some stories are too good to end cleanly.
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