Ferrari 348
Why 5.5: The first Ferrari V8 mounted lengthways rather than across the car, with the gearbox turned sideways underneath it — a layout that lowered the engine and lengthened the wheelbase, and that every mid-engine Ferrari since has kept. It arrived to a reception it never recovered from, and that is exactly why the ownership numbers look healthy: nobody is protecting an investment in a 348.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The 3.4 flat-plane V8 sits longitudinally behind the seats and has the hard Ferrari eight-cylinder bark to 7,500 rpm. Held back by heavily catalysed 1990s silencing — muted below 4,000, where the F355 that followed is not.
8-cylinder · naturally aspirated · 7,500 rpm redline · rated 7.8 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €93k (1990) → €87k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation in the only passenger seat there is.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
Ferrari replaced the beloved 328 with a car wearing Testarossa side strakes and a reputation, fair or not, for letting go without warning when pushed. Then in 1994 the F355 landed with five valves per cylinder and a chassis that answered every criticism, and the 348 spent the next twenty years as the Ferrari you bought when you could not afford a Ferrari. Around 8,800 were built across the tb coupé, ts targa and the 1993 Spider, which is a lot of cars to absorb a bad reputation, and prices bottomed near forty thousand dollars through the 2000s. That floor is what made it a driver’s car by accident: the people who bought at the bottom were buying a gated shifter and a flat-plane V8, not an appreciating asset, and they used them accordingly. Values have roughly doubled off that low, but the 348 still sits below every other mid-engine V8 Ferrari, and the belt service still costs what a Ferrari belt service costs.