Got the Italian Passion Cars Early? No, You’re Not Going to Get Banned

If you’ve booted up Forza Horizon 6 in the last couple of weeks, found the Italian Passion cars sitting in your garage, and immediately felt your stomach drop — you’re not alone. The forums, Discord, and half the FH6 subreddit lit up with the same question: “I’ve got the DLC cars but I never bought them. Am I about to get banned?” And to be clear, this isn’t just Premium owners seeing their freebies land — plenty of players who never purchased the pack at all report the four Italian cars simply showing up, free of charge.

Short answer: no. Longer answer: it’s worth understanding why not, because the panic is based on a misunderstanding of what Playground Games actually bans people for. Let’s clear it up.

What people are actually seeing

The Italian Passion Car Pack launched alongside the Series 3 “Italian Exotics” update. It bundles four cars — the 2025 Ferrari F80, the 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB4 Spider, the 2021 Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm, and the 1990 Alfa Romeo SE 048SP — and per the official Forza Support FAQ, the pack costs $4.99, is free with the Premium Edition or Premium Upgrade, and was scheduled to drop the cars into garages automatically starting Tuesday, July 14 at 3:00 PM UTC.

That phrase — “automatically added at 3:00 PM UTC” — is where the confusion started. A staggered, timed rollout across Xbox, the Microsoft Store, and Steam is never perfectly clean. So players ran into a spread of these:

The pack landed in the garages of people who never bought it and don’t own Premium — free cars, no purchase, no prompt. This is the one setting off the most alarm.
The four cars showed up early, before the official unlock time, for players who were owed them.
The pack briefly appeared as free or already-owned for Premium owners — because it genuinely is free for you.
The opposite problem: cars a player does own throw a “requires purchase” error, especially on a second PC or after switching devices. There’s an active thread on the official Forza forums about exactly this — same account, two machines, one works and one demands payment.

Every one of those is an entitlement and rollout error on Microsoft’s and Playground’s side. Notice the important part: even in the case where non-owners got the cars for free, the player did nothing. You didn’t glitch anything, exploit anything, or click a single thing you weren’t supposed to. The store pushed content it shouldn’t have. That’s a grant error, not a player exploit — and the two are treated completely differently.

Why a store-side grant isn’t a bannable offense

Here’s the part that should let you sleep. There is a hard line between “the game gave me something it shouldn’t have” and “I abused a bug or cracked the game to take something.” Playground bans for the second category. They do not ban you for the first — because the first isn’t something you can be blamed for.

We watched exactly how they handle the first category last month. When the infamous GMC Hummer EV credit glitch let players balloon their bank accounts to nearly a billion credits, Playground rolled everyone back to a 10-million-credit ceiling and — critically — wrote in their support FAQ: “As this error was on our side, no further action will be taken.” No bans. No suspensions. Just a quiet server-side correction. We covered that whole saga in our Series 2 update breakdown, and it’s the clearest signal you’ll get: when the mistake is theirs, the fix is theirs too.

And notice — the Hummer situation was arguably worse than this one, because players there actively performed the glitch to farm credits. Getting the Italian Passion cars dropped into your garage is more passive than that: you didn’t do anything at all. If you own the pack or Premium, it’s yours to keep. If you’re one of the players who got it free without buying it, the realistic worst case is that Playground quietly removes the cars in a future rollback once they patch the grant — the same way they clawed back the Hummer credits. That’s a “the cars disappear again,” not a “your account is gone.” A rollback corrects the mistake; it doesn’t punish the person who happened to be standing there when it happened.

What will actually get you banned

To be crystal clear, because this is the useful bit: Playground absolutely does swing the ban hammer — just not at you for this. The genuinely bannable stuff is:

Piracy and leaks. The studio threatened franchise-wide bans when the game leaked ahead of launch, and a YouTuber was reportedly banned before the game was even out for posting leaked footage.
Unauthorized mods, trainers, cheat tables, and hacked save files — especially anything touching online play.
Exploiting bugs for gain, like the Hummer credit trick or the drag-tire leaderboard abuse. Even then, the first response is usually a rollback or a wipe rather than a ban. Series 3 reset all Rivals leaderboards to scrub those illegitimate times, which we got into in our post-drag-tire-nerf touge guide.

Notice the pattern: bans are for circumventing the system, not for receiving content the system handed you. Downloading a car pack you own — or that Premium entitles you to — is the most sanctioned thing you can do in the game.

What to do if you’re still nervous

If you want peace of mind, keep it simple:

Don’t do anything weird. Don’t re-download through sketchy sources, don’t install a “DLC unlocker,” don’t touch cheat tools. Whether you own the pack or it just appeared for free, you haven’t broken a rule by leaving it alone and playing normally — so don’t go “fixing” a non-problem in a way that does look sketchy.
If a car shows a “purchase required” error, it’s a license-sync hiccup. Restart the game, check that your Xbox/Steam entitlements have synced, and make sure the Gaming Services / Store are fully updated. It typically resolves on its own once the rollout finishes.
If it doesn’t resolve, submit a ticket through Forza Support rather than trying to force it. That’s the intended path and it leaves a clean record that you did things properly.

Bottom line

Nobody is getting banned for driving an F80 that Playground’s own store dropped into their garage. A DLC rollout is messy by nature, and when the mess grants cars to people who didn’t pay, that’s the studio’s problem to unwind — not a crime the players committed. Playground’s precedent is clear: they quietly correct their mistakes without punishing the people caught in them. So enjoy the Italian metal while it’s here, and if it vanishes in a rollback down the line, that’s the system balancing its own books — not a black mark on you. If you want the full rundown on everything else Series 3 brought, our Italian Exotics deep dive has you covered.

Sources: Forza Support — Italian Passion Car Pack FAQ, Forza.net Series 3 announcement, Official Forza Forums DLC thread, Dexerto — FH6 credit rollback.