2012 Ferrari 458 Spider - First Drive Review - Car and Driver
Despite some compelling evidence to the contrary, the Ferrari 458 Spider is not perfect. Also, Ferrari offers no manual transmission in the 458, spider or coupe. And then there’s this: During our first drive of the new 458 Spider on an autostrada near Bologna, Italy, we followed another writer who was driving a pearlescent white 458 Spider doing its best Buick Lucerne imitation, right-turn indicator... We pretended for a moment or two that this might have been the writer/journalist signaling to other motorists that they were right to think of Ferrari drivers as doofuses not worthy of such a car. But we knew it was the fault of the driver's unfamiliarity with the car's odd steering-wheel-mounted turn-signal buttons. In Ferrari’s zeal to locate pretty much every control away from the car’s column-mounted shift paddles, the signals—controlled by a stalk in just about every other car ever built—are now actuated by buttons on the steering wheel. Covered in knobs and buttons and blinking lights, the wheel looks like what you’d find in a Formula 1 car, or like a dinner plate covered in knobs, buttons, and switches. There’s pretty much nothing else to complain about, because the 458 Spider is a spectacular car. An animal, that is, that has Benzedrine racing through its vessels like electricity through copper, its. Source: www.caranddriver.com
