aCayenneFan

I totally hear you.

.2PDK

I'm leaning this way as well but would look for a manual 911 replacement.

I've looked at other brands extensively but keep coming back to the 911....

Penn4S

Facts would really help. Not guessing failure rates based on a thread. If we had PDK transmissions "dropping like flies" I think we would hear about it and there would be some blow back at Porsche.
I am on Pcar number 13. I had one major failure in a 996 TT that required a new tranny that was replaced in less than a week by Porsche.
I have owned several other brand, none with the driver satisfaction or quality of workmanship of Porsche. Can anyone name another high end sports car brand that in just yearly maintenance doesn't break the bank.
So far Porsche has stood behind any failures. If I lose confidence in the brand due to their lack of support I'll stop buying. Who wants to buy a $100 k plus car that you have to quick sell before its expiration date.
Porsche's have been good to me so far I'll hang in there till they stop standing behind their product. So far my TTS has been flawless.

Bacura

^Plus 1000. Have had 2 with PDK. No issues at all.

alainpp

After reading all the feedback from the failures, it looks like this is more a software/sensor problem than a mechanical failure. Everyone with the failure report that the car felt good/normal, no vibrations or weird sounds, and then the failure message.

dkhm3

Those of you with failures:

Do you drive the car in manual mode most of the time?
Do you use the coasting feature attributed to the failure as one guy said?
What are your driving habits with the tranny?

PCA1983

Early failures are what the Warranty is for. PDK and manual tranny failures do occur, but they are few and mostly early in the life of the car. Those failures are from occasional mfg defects, and this will happen even on the best cars.
My C2S manual tranny needed replacement when I bought it at 1 year and 3100 miles due to a broken 2nd gear synchro. Porsche replaced it with an apology and a nice loaner, and the replacement is still going strong for the next owner. The rumors I heard were that Porsche's supplier made a design change on that synchro weld that was very sensitive to weld defects, and that it was quickly changed. Porsche wants any engine or transmission with a problem to be shipped back to Zuffenhausen for analysts and remedial action, as part of their QA. Dealer service shops are not allowed to open an engine or transmission under warranty. This is a plus for Porsche reliability.

cclcal

I sure hope so....

Dealer just reset my DME, not sure why but they said there was a open campaign on my car for that.

Gasol1

the_buch

I would think driving in manual most of the time would reduce the failure rate in that you're likely doing less shifting than in auto mode (though maybe more downshifting when approaching a stop or slow-down)??

vjd3

The Ferrari dual-clutch transmissions -- built by Getrag and debuting in the 2009 California -- have had some trouble with the speed sensor, or, more specifically, wiring to the speed sensor. In the earlier models, Getrag used some plastic clips (they look like oversized zip-ties) to route the wiring. The plastic used could not cope with the temperatures inside the box and would become brittle over time and abrade the wiring, causing the errors and similar symptoms -- loss of even gears, etc. The problem is the sensor and wiring is all inside the transmission, and the techs were not trained to open the box. You can imagine how expensive replacement would be on a Ferrari out of warranty. They changed the plastic in later versions (2012 on). Now Ferrari has started training techs to repair the transmissions, rather than replacing them, as Porsche does. I would think Porsche could do the same -- it's just a transmission, albeit a sophisticated one -- and that would alleviate a lot of concerns. A $5k repair bill is bad news but a $25k repair bill can be catastrophic.

I never drive mine in anything but manual and have had no issues on two 2013 991s.

BGB Motorsports

I have seen my fair share of PDK problems. It seems as if every time a PDK begins to act up anywhere in the world, people call us because of the time we have spent trying to service these things. Once the warranty expires, folks call us. i think i myself have spent more time diagnosing PDKs, calibrating PDKs, servicing PDKs and screwing with them than most dealerships because i'm dumb enough to believe i can help. There are no replacement parts for these gearboxes. There are no tools to open up these gearboxes that you can buy. The dealership will do just as the OP listed:

1.) Look at faults, clear codes, MAYBE flush the fluid.
2.) re-calibrate and wait.
3.) replace the valve body & re-calibrate.
4.) replace the box and re-calibrate and send you on your way.

95% of the time the replacement PDK solves the problem. 65% of the time the replacement valve body fixes the problem. 35% of the time the re-calibration fixes the problem. It's this behavior that leads me to believe that it truly is more of a software issue than a hardware issue because re-calibrating is changing the behavior whereas if it was a hardware issue, a PIWIS calibration wouldn't fix anything. The bigger problem is the lack of consistency in the symptoms: some cars lose reverse, some cars leak, some cars start shifting oddly, some cars shudder, etc. (the ones that leak and shudder have literally 10K miles of race track time on them. and only 3 have failed of which i know.

I chose to embrace the PDK problems because no one else wanted to and i think that's why people call us a lot when the PDKs fail. I have gone and made the next steps to start opening these boxes to find out the problems because no one else wants to look inside of them. The core values are $5K - $6K so i haven't been able to keep a gearbox when sending it back to Porsche because they want the cores and who has $6K to invest in a test box? I have a few PDKs that have been damaged because of crashes that are not returnable cores that i am opening and that's what we are using to make parts.

I like PDK - while it didn't show up in production, early prototypes exited in the 956/962 race cars. It's in a lot of race cars we build, it's in every single Clubsport raced on the planet and to date, maybe 3 - 4 Clubsport PDKs have acted up out of the 100 or so cars that are raced here in the U.S. and those failures came after 10K miles of race track abuse. These poor cars have the crap kicked out of them around some of the most abusive race tracks and the GT4 Clubsport, which is a factory built race car with a PDK, seems to have a very strong reliability rate.

I can't help but think that the problem is more software than hardware related but without a supply of parts and without someone to service them, you're sending gearboxes back to Germany to get torn down, inspected and put back together with all fresh bits.

.2PDK

Do you feel that warm or cold weather affect durability in any way?

BGB Motorsports

I'm not an engineer and i don't work for Porsche so this is just speculation but the colder the ambient, the better it is on the car for heat soak reasons; it has to be a big swing though in the ambient because once the thing is on track and up to temp or on the highway, 10F here and there isn't going to make or break you. Im talking 50F differences in ambient temps would be needed to see any major changes in the fluid temp. The car's coolant temp has the single biggest influence on the PDK temp because of how it's being cooled because the fluid in the PDK is cooled via a coolant cooled "heat exchanger." The car has solenoids that open and close these coolant passages so if you're out there driving around on a 40F day, the car is actually going to intentionally heat soak the PDK fluid by not allowing coolant to pass through the exchanger until it gets up to operating temperature.

More to the point of your question, i have seen cars act up at Sebring in 95F temperatures more so than cars that act up down there when its a 45F day but what i think is more taxing to the PDK is the nature of the race track that you're on. For example, i've seen them misbehave at Road Atlanta and Road America on cooler days and i think it's because of the nature of these uphill tracks that have a lot of load on them when you're grabbing the higher gears. Blasting up the hills at Atlanta and Elklhart shifting into 4th and 5th gear is putting a large amount of load on the PDK.

You'd have to do an experiment to prove it but heat is the enemy of everything on these cars. I guess i probably could have made a long answer short by saying that it would be easier for a PDK to live where it's never over 50F ambient but i've also seen some PDKs outlast others with way more abuse on them. I think that every now and again, the parts are just the tiniest bit out of tolerance which causes them to fail the calibration process and have to be returned. The calibration process addresses the pressure sensors, the clutches and the shift rods and when it sees a shift rod move too far out of range it freaks out and says NO WAY and then the box won't ever calibrate and has to go back.

StormRune

For those thinking that a manual tranny would fix the problem.... it might... but just FYI the 991 manual tranny is actually a PDK tranny with a different clutch and an elaborate mechanism to map the gear shift inputs to the two-path (even/odd gears) shifting used by the PDK. If most of the PDK problems being reported happen to be in the clutch or auto-shifting mechanism then switching to a car with a manual tranny would help. Using a single transmission base for both allowed for a significant manufacturing cost savings of course.

But if it is in the core transmission and gearing section having problems then manual trannies will be having the same problems. The percentage of manual trannies out there are far fewer than automatic PDKs so maybe that is making for less reports. Dunno....