sbonomo

So I experience the dreaded transmission failure warning light on my '14 - 991.1 - GT3. The car was at the stealership having the main seal replaced so they diagnosed the transmission at the same time. Their solution was a 32K replacement PDK. Hmmm. After some research on this forum Guide to PDK repair huge thank you to @PV997 for all the work on this thread. I was able to locate a indi mechanic in Lake Forest, CA (Tony - True Performance) that has some experience servicing the PDK's. After a diagnostic he determined that the PDK was leaking from an internal gasket. He removed the transmission replace all of the gaskets and reprogrammed the transmission. The total bill came to just over 5K. The gasket was 30-40 bucks and had to be custom made. Shame on Porsche. If you get the error message please do your homework if the car is not in Warranty. Tony is great to work with and was able to diagnose, fix and return the car within 3-days. In my opinion it is shameful that porsche has not made parts and repairs available rather than having their client base shoulder the massive expense for a new transmission.

Porsche_nuts

I agree.

Shameful.

asellus

yeah, economics suck. cheaper to train overall replacement than it is to train disassembly, repair, and reassembly of a complex, low-failure-rate component.

Fredie

Smells like a future class action lawsuit to me. I ended up with Fidelity extended warranties on both our Porsches with PDK’s to hedge after they were out of factory coverage. 991.2 S and Macan Turbo.
Porsches arrogance is not going to serve them well long term. IMHO

asellus

and how would this read exactly? "17 people dissatisfied with proposed fix by porsche, demand slower, error-prone method be used instead" ?

Jack F

Fidelity 10yr/100k warranty purchased before 10k miles while under warranty was about $4200. That is good piece of mind, at least for me.

jfischet

you not counting the total costs. it's way cheeper to repair than to replace.

and it is also shameful that porsche isn't the one with the repair expertise to share and parts to sell but rather we're left to figure this all out for ourselves.

asellus

it's cheaper for a single unit, sure. but you're not counting the infrastructure costs to facilitate such a repair at a brand level.

to train a tech in every dealership the ins and outs of tearing down and rebuilding a PDK has tremendous costs. if you want to cut those costs and just train a few regional specialists, you'll have shipping to/from costs and labor on top of that time and training for the specialist to perform their work.

at the end of the day we're talking dozens of PDKs failing, not tens of thousands. these failures amount to statistical noise. there is a zero chance that any beancounter is going to approve that kind of expense on what is practically an intangible benefit. cheaper to throw whole PDKs at people.

even if porsche made the financially ridiculous decision to do repairs on these units instead of replacements, we're talking about changing that $20-35k 3-day turnaround to a $3-10k two week turnaround. it's a catch-22 -- **** people off by charging money, or **** people off by taking time.

extra credit: what happens when they attempt to repair and that repair fails? or causes another problem?

jfischet

your perspective seems to be from that of a dealership and i guess in that case you're correct it certainly is cheeper for them to just swap. however, the costs of building a new PDK unit for replacement as opposed to fixing a small part inside it are real to society in general if nothing else.

i'm even not asking for porsche to train their own mechanics, just to share the repair information and sell the replacement parts.

asellus

porsche refurbishes them in-house, kinda similar to the "regional expert" example above.. except I believe the region is "earth" and the expert is "the guys in germany." when you get a replacement PDK, it's usually a used/reman unit, not a brand-new unit, so take some solace in that from an environmental standpoint I suppose.

releasing detailed schematics of a relatively new, proprietary, and complex piece of equipment along with materials with which to build/repair one is kind of shooting oneself in the foot. sure, on the consumer side that's a boon, but from a business competition perspective that's a poor move. sucks, but it is what it is. as mentioned, indies have figured out how to repair some of these things, so it's only a matter of time before that knowledge becomes more widespread. marketing internal parts I don't think will ever happen though, as this feels like another Getrag 420G situation.

Lippy

Dunno. They seem to repair trannies on just about every other car, rather than replace them. I call BS.

asellus

which other DCT-equipped cars receive repairs over replacements, exactly?

Laszlo_Laz

Porsche should repair and/or provide ways for independents to do so.

I’d be absolutely sick at a $32k for a transmission.

Being a VW Group behemoth and then not taking on any responsibility or alternatives, I see future class action eventually as well.

Also, a good warranty is an absolute must for these cars. I’d never own one out of CPO or fidelity. That’s such a high risk.

Glad OP got the PDK repaired.

Please check in periodically on the long term reliability of the repair.

Joec500

Even Apple provides tools you can rent and schematics to repair iphones. There is no reason why Porsche can't provide the same information. Or at the very least allow the manufactures of the transmissions to share that information open sourced. It would def raise the resale of their cars.

Laszlo_Laz

I’m sure California will lead the effort.