Ferrari 488 vs F8 vs 296: Where the 488 Sits, and Where the V8 Line Ends

Ferrari built three mid-engine two-seaters in the space of seven years, kept them looking broadly alike, and changed almost everything underneath. One of the three is in a garage on Robertson Boulevard; the other two are here so you know what you are choosing between.

Nobody arrives at a Ferrari cold. By the time somebody asks about a day in one they have watched a hundred videos, and the videos are of three different cars that a passer-by would struggle to tell apart. The 488 GTB, the F8 that replaced it and the 296 that followed are all mid-engine, all two seats, all roughly the same silhouette, and all separated by differences that matter enormously on paper and unevenly on Sunset.

So this is the version an operator would give you. Ours is the 488 GTB, in Rosso, and it is the only one of the three we can hand over — the F8 and the 296 are named here because they are the cars you will read about next, not because they are on the calendar. The Ferrari rental rate is one figure for one car, which makes the specification the only part of the decision left.

The three cars in thirty seconds

The numbers side by side, because the marketing rarely puts them there:

	488 GTB	F8	296 GTB
Years	2015–2019	2019–2023	2022–
Engine	3.9L twin-turbo V8	3.9L twin-turbo V8	3.0L twin-turbo V6 plus electric motor
Cylinders	8	8	6
Horsepower	661	710	819 combined
Torque	561 lb-ft	568 lb-ft	546 lb-ft
0–60 mph	3.0s	2.9s	2.9s
Top speed	205 mph	211 mph	205 mph
Electric range	None	None	About 16 miles
In our garage	One, in Rosso	None	None

Read the 0–60 row and then stop reading it. A tenth of a second covers all three, and no public road in Los Angeles County will ever show you the difference. What separates them is the engine's character, the noise it makes at eight thousand revolutions, and whether the car can leave a residential street at six in the morning without waking anybody on it.

The 488 is the car that turned the corner

Every mid-engine Ferrari since is a footnote to what happened in 2015. The 458's naturally aspirated V8 was the sound the internet had agreed a Ferrari makes, and Ferrari replaced it with 3,902 cubic centimetres of twin-turbocharged V8 — the first turbocharged mid-engine Ferrari V8 since the F40, making 661 horsepower at 8,000 rpm and 561 lb-ft at 3,000. Purists mourned in public for about a year and then went quiet, because the car was extraordinary.

Two details tell you more about how it drives than the power figure does. The torque arrives at three thousand revolutions rather than seven, which means the 488 is savage from anywhere in the rev range and does not need to be wrung out to feel fast — a genuinely different experience from the car it replaced. And the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox shifts faster than you can decide to shift it, so the paddles are theatre as much as control.

The honest caveat, because somebody has to say it. If you have watched enough of the 458 to expect a shriek at the top of the range, the 488 does not do that. The turbos flatten the top end and replace it with something deeper, harder and more violent low down. It is not worse. It is not the noise from the video.

Standing still it is the shape people mean. The scalloped intakes behind the doors quote the 308 GTB directly, the roofline is a fixed berlinetta, and the whole thing sits low enough that the first thing every guest does is discover the door has to be opened outward and upward at the same time. Ours is a single car in Rosso with a black and red cabin, and there is one of it, so the date decides more than the specification does.

What the F8 changed, and whether you would notice

Ferrari replaced the 488 in 2019 with the F8 Tributo. It is the same 3.9-litre V8 carrying the tune from the 488 Pista: 710 horsepower at 8,000 rpm, 568 lb-ft, a tenth quicker to sixty and six miles an hour faster flat out, with fifteen per cent more downforce than the car it replaced.

Now the useful part. Forty-nine horsepower on a car that already had six hundred and sixty-one is invisible on a public road. What is visible is the back of the car: four round tail lamps instead of two, a homage to the F430, and a clear louvred engine cover in place of the 488's glass. That is how people at a valet stand tell them apart, and it is most of what a passenger will perceive.

So the F8 is a better car and a smaller upgrade than its own spec sheet implies, which is the shape of most facelifts. It is also not a car in this fleet, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than at the bottom of a page. If those four tail lamps are the exact thing you came for, nothing here substitutes for them. If what you came for is the engine, the layout and the shape, that is the 488, and there is one of it with a calendar attached.

The 296 is not a V8 at all, and that is the whole story

Here is where the lineage stops being a lineage. The 296 GTB puts a 2,992 cc twin-turbocharged V6 behind the seats — 654 horsepower on its own — and adds an electric motor of 165 horsepower between the engine and the gearbox, for 819 horsepower together. There is a 7.45 kWh battery under the floor and about sixteen miles of electric-only running, which exists so the car can cross a zero-emission zone in a European city and, incidentally, means it can leave a Beverly Hills street at six in the morning in silence.

Car and Driver's testing of the 296 makes the case for it in one line: it is the quickest rear-wheel-drive car they have tested. The hybrid system fills the gaps a turbocharger leaves, so the 296 pulls in places where a 488 is still deciding.

What it does not do is sound like the cars above it, because it is not one of them. Six cylinders in a 120-degree vee make a noise Ferrari has spent four years teaching people to like. If you want the flat, hard V8 bark that most people mean when they say "Ferrari", the 296 is the wrong direction and the 488 is the right one. That is not a sales line — it is why the V8 cars have held value the way they have.

GTB or Spider — ours is the GTB

These two get mixed up constantly, including by people who have already paid for one somewhere. Ferrari built the 488 in two bodies on identical running gear. The GTB is the fixed-roof berlinetta. The Spider carries a folding hardtop, about fifty kilograms of roof mechanism, and a top speed three miles an hour lower for the trouble. Same 3.9-litre V8, same 661 horsepower, same three seconds.

Ours is the GTB, and the badge on the dashboard says so. If the roof coming down was the actual point of the day, say so early and we will point you at what opens: the Huracán Spider, the Rolls-Royce Dawn and the Porsche Boxster are the three roofs in this garage that fold, and they sit on the convertible page with live dates.

What a Ferrari costs for a day in Los Angeles

The 488 GTB is $1,999/day, and it is one car rather than a category, so the rate does not move with which one is free. What moves is the date: a Saturday in May behaves differently from a Tuesday in February, and there is nothing we can do about that except answer quickly.

One thing about longer stays is worth stating plainly, because it runs the other way from what people expect. Most of this fleet carries a five-day and a twenty-one-day block rate alongside the daily one, and the quote takes whichever combination of those is cheapest. The 488 carries a daily rate only. Five days on the Ferrari is five days, priced as five days, and a longer booking is quoted by hand rather than read off a table — which is a slower answer than "it gets cheaper", and the true one.

• The deposit is refundable and it is the top band we hold. It is a hold against the card in the primary renter's name, not a charge, and it is released 5–7 business days after the car is back.
• Under twenty-five, this is the expensive car to be young in. The young-driver fee is $175/day on a car in this deposit band. On most of the fleet it is $50/day, and the gap is worth knowing before you fall in love with the photographs.
• Cover is mandatory and priced per day off the deposit band. Your own policy replaces it if it genuinely extends to this car's replacement value — read the wording rather than assuming, because most do not. The figure is in the quote before you pay anything.
• Twenty-one and up, licence held two years, credit card in the driver's name. The rest is on the terms page, including everything about changes to a confirmed booking.

Getting it delivered, and the one place the 488 is awkward

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard costs nothing, and delivery to our partner Beverly Hills hotels is complimentary. Any other address is quoted before you pay.

LAX delivery is paid, in two tiers, priced each way. Standard is $75: the car is left in the airport parking structure and you ride the airport shuttle out to collect it, which adds about half an hour and is awkward with luggage. VIP is $150: the car comes to the terminal and somebody is standing beside it. They combine per direction, so a round trip is $150 on the standard tier both ways, $300 on VIP both ways, or $225 for VIP in and standard out.

Match the tier to the car rather than to the budget, because on this one they are not the same decision. A 488 has a front boot and nothing else — two soft bags is the honest limit, and there is no back seat to overflow into. Riding a shuttle across an airport with luggage that will not fit in the car at the other end is the worst version of a good day, so on the Ferrari specifically the terminal tier is usually the one to take. On an SUV the calculation is entirely different, which is the point of publishing both figures instead of the phrase "delivery options available".

The Ferrari in the fleet → Everything else at this end of the garage →