Opposer

Some guy sells his cayman 987.1 2.7 with 70k miles on it. What mileage do usually 2.7 reach before rebuild or engine change?
Heard some stories on youtube about 270k miles and "still strong"

How safe is it to buy 70k-miles cayman?

LexVan

Way too many factors play into this. But, yes a 2.7 can easily go over 200,000 miles. 70,000 miles is nothing. What's the maintenance history? Oil change history?
Track car or daily driver/weekend toy? That's only about 6,000 miles per year. Very average.

extanker

wow

ibdavid

I'm at 185k. Every other day driver, no track days, no stop and go traffic, just a back road cruiser. I keep the oil changed and drive/enjoy it like my 6 other past Pcars. If you don't look down at the odo, you'd think the car has <80k. As always, get PPI and have oil examined, if good, buy and drive.

Boxsterman

As the others have said, get all the records you possibly can as well as a PPI, then you will have a better idea what condition the car is in.

Macster

My 2002 2.7l engine has over 315K miles and doesn't manifest any signs of needing a rebuild or refresh. (There have been reports of 996 Turbo engines covering 400K+ even 550K+ miles and not needing a rebuild. In one case, the 400K+ mile engine, the owner dropped the engine and tore it down to address some leaks and refresh worn parts and reported he found no signs of wear.)

If you find a 70K+ miles Cayman with a good service history the odds are the engine can go double, triple, or more miles.

Keep in mind there is wear but an engine can be brought down by a part failure. An engine is only as strong as its weakest part so while the engine may not wear out it could suffer a serious problem at some point. Mine did at around the 260K mile mark. A VarioCam solenod/actuator had to be replaced. But that was around 50K+ miles ago and the replacements are working just fine and the other side is still original.

But if a rod bolt failed or a piston pin clip fell out or a cam chain snapped this could bring the engine to a premature end of life maybe not even rebuildable. Still for a street driven engine the odds of these or similar things happening are rare.

However, I don't think about things like that when I'm in my Boxster and give it the whip. Once in a while I take the engine up to redline. It is still a Porsche, after all, even with over 315K miles on the car/engine.

FlamsteadHill

Nowhere near enough information.

As some have stated, 200k is not the least bit unreasonable if even moderately taken care of.

And yet I will opine that you could easily have an un-rebuildable engine at 70k. Oil pressure and compression of each cylinder should give you a good idea, and a thorough PPI will give you the answers. Not to say there are any guarantees, but you can possibly eliminate the obvious.

Macster

Yes an engine could be unrebuildable at 70K miles but a reasonably thorough used car check out which must (or should) include a proper road test would I think make it clear to the prospective buyer that the car was *not* the one to buy. One might not recognize the severity of the condition of the engine but at least he'd know enough to walk away from the car.

As a bit of extra info is -- and I don't remember the source now -- is that an auto engine is good for around 10,000 hours of run time. With an average speed of 30mph that works out to 300,000 miles.

Some time ago I had my Boxster's engine run time pulled and the average speed was pretty darn close to 30mph. Nothing's really changed in terms of how I drive the car so I think that 30mph average is probably pretty close to the average speed over all the miles driven. So with over 315K miles the engine has run pretty close to if not more than 10,000 hours. And yet it still runs and pretty darn good too.

Smitten

I didn't see whether or not the candidate car is PDK or manual. If manual, the DME over-rev report is really important. Do you have that yet?