You can buy a nice new Porsche for tens of thousands of pounds. Take out the Porsche finance to pay it up, take Porsche insurance, pay them for GAP insurance, take a £1500 a year warranty for the first few years and also get them to service it for the first three years. They will smile and be very kind to you whilst doing this BUT you've bought a defective car (which they know about).

Its fact that there is an inherent problem with the Porsche 996/997 models which is known as the dreaded 'bore scoring'. Those two words can instantly raise fear of any owner of these vehicles as its a fatal flaw that is costing thousands of innocent Porsche victims worldwide, thousands of pounds, in most cases in excess of £10,000 for a new engine. I am one of those unfortunate Porsche victims and I am definitely not going to be the last. THESE CARS WERE NEVER RECALLED. Porsche effectively thought that they would put their head in the sand and hoping that the problem would go away. Funny how the sales people at Porsche don't tell you about the potential issues when you buy the car.

WHY would Porsche think they had no need to address the problem?. The average car manufacturer takes their responsibly and RECALLS the car to rectify the problem. However when you buy a Porsche and pay £53500 for a two year old one you don't expect to be replacing the engine after 7 years of ownership. I had never heard of the dreaded 'scored bore' issue until my car started showing the highly obvious symptoms: excessive oil consumption, noisy engine and sooted left tail pipe, there are no shortage of stories on hundreds of forums from Porsche victims around the world.

The customer services are very arrogant, cocky, disinterested and don't want anything to do with you. It's almost like they are non existent especially as your 'loyalty to the brand' (actual quote from Rachel at Porsche UK HQ) is somewhat lacking over the past 3 or 4 years as I failed to get my car serviced at the Porsche dealer and instead used a highly recognised Porsche (non dealer) garage for my servicing, nor did I continue with my £1500 a year Porsche warranty and my car is now over eight years (jan 2005) old so its basically a case of 'tough' you have not remained loyal enough to the brand for us to even consider any form of 'goodwill'.

They have indeed told me that in order for them to asses what level of goodwill, if any, they will give me (and by my lack of loyalty to the brand over the past few years I suspect the goodwill would be non existent or an absolute insult) I will have to get my engine ripped out at the Porsche dealership for them to wiggle their way out of any liability...oops I meant ...asses the problem to conclude whether it is the dreaded 'scored bores' or not. In the process I will be left carless. Now, all I want to know from them is if they are of the opinion that it is 'scored bores' and based on my lack of loyalty to the brand (that is so laughable) they must be able to tell me now, before taking my car to pieces, what level of 'goodwill' I am likely to get, if any at all.

I have heard so many stories of Porsche dealers asking Porsche victims to either pay up to get their car engine replaced or get the car towed off their premises so as I don't want to be caught between a rock and a hard place all I want to know is what, if anything am I likely to get? If their level of goodwill was going to be £500 towards the cost of a £15000 engine replacement then I would most definitely be towing my car out of there never to set foot in a Porsche garage again. They have put so many people in that position and I am not going to follow suit.

Many people will say, 'well you can afford a Porsche so you can afford to pay for repairs' which is absolutely true but not the issue here, I have no problem paying for an expensive repair that is not a well documented problem with Porsche engineering and an inherent one that was going to happen regardless of who serviced my car over the years or how well I drove it or how often I serviced it etc. This was ALWAYS going to happen so for Porsche to try and wiggle out of paying for a new engine, not just for me but for other Porsche owners around the globe, is ridiculous and its daylight robbery.

You buy a Porsche expecting it to last a very long time....you certainly don't expect it to end up in the ever expanding Porsche graveyard after just 7 years of ownership and 72k miles on the clock!

Lynne

 

Helluva first post! Bottle 'o Prozac may help.

 

 

Yes, there has been some obvious problems with these cars, especially the 996's but before you purchase a car, you must do your research and should budget for any common problems such as an IMS fix.

Why dont you tell us what happened to you?

 

The current statistics for longevity (per Consumer Reports) for an average new car is 8 years OR 150,000 miles. The OR is a significant feature, since a low-mileage car still has parts that have heat-cycled for many years.

I don't claim to know what Porsche thinks, but there has to be some metric for what counts as acceptable vehicle mortality. In your case, where you acquired a 2-year-old vehicle and owned it for seven years, the manufacturer likely feels that nine years of service life is "acceptable."

If the car in question was a Hyundai Accent, I don't believe anyone would even **** an eyebrow if the engine punked out after nine years. Of course we all understand that a new four-cylinder Hyundai engine costs less than a new M96, but expecting a $100,000 car to last twice as long as a $20,000 car just isn't realistic. The engine blocks, hoses, belts, and accessories are built from the same metals, rubber, and plastics, regardless of whether the car is assembled in Stuttgart or Seoul.

Porsche's attitude toward you certainly seems callous, but to be frank you're much more likely to get goodwill if your five-year-old Turbo blows an engine rather than your second- or third-hand 996. There's profit to be made by keeping the guy who buys a new 911 every six years happy. There's probably not profit to be made by keeping someone like me, who buys his Porsches third-hand, happy.

I feel for you - and I know you're not the only one in this situation. However, Porsche is a money-making venture, and there is no money to be made shipping and installing crate engines for people like us who drive 10-15 year old 911s, especially when we're not the ones who shelled out for the initial new-car depreciation.

If you do get some form of good will from Porsche, let us know.

PS - REGARDLESS of the price, buying a used machine is inherently riskier than buying a new machine. All machinery fails over time. Rolex parts cost more than Timex parts. We buy used 911's because we've weighed the peace of mind that a new car provides against the tens of thousands we'd pay in depreciation. Sometimes it pays off tremendously, and sometimes we don't save as much as we'd hoped. We also know from watching F1 that high-performance engines don't last nearly as long as big, slow, engines. A big diesel block making 40 HP/liter and never spinning past 5K RPM is going to last longer than a 3.4 liter 996 engine making 88HP a liter and spinning at 7K RPM. The point of this is not to rub your nose in your situation, but rather to point out that your situation, while crappy, is one that many of us are going to contend with.

 

WIN! ^^^

 

I realize you didn't purchase in the US, but the above is absolutely not accurate here.

Automotive manufacturers issue 'recalls' pretty much only when there is a bodily-injury safety issue and the manufacturer has either been forced to issue the recall by the NHTSA or is pretty sure they would eventually be forced to do so if they didn't do it voluntarily. Cars are virtually never recalled for non-safety related product defects.

Manufacturers do sometimes issue service bulletins for known defects, and IF the customer experiences the problem WHILE the vehicle is under warranty (or occasionally shortly after warranty through 'goodwill'), the manufacturer will fix the problem. Find out about the problem after warranty, you are almost always on your own, known issue or not.

This isn't just Porsche... Ford to Ferrari, Acura to Aston Martin. Read ANY forum for ANY model from ANY manufacturer and you will find the same complaint...

"Manufacturer X knows darn well about defect Y on model Z... Why don't they just fix everyones car?"

 

I often wonder if these sorts of posts are just Flat Six Innovations just trolling the forum. It is not like the various issues are not well known and beaten to death on the internet. How does someone buy a 996 or 997 and not be aware of them and take precautions against them? The chances of any individual engine going is pretty low but it can happen and everyone knows that. Having a hard time following how at this stage of the game anyone could be shocked if their number comes up on one of these cars. Pissed that you really are that five an a hundred guy, sure. But shocked and angry at Porsche?

 

OP thinks he has problems???? earlier this week a guy's car stalled at a red light! A RED LIGHT!!!! he could have been killed, yet Porsche deliberately refuses to send him a new 991....... I'm done with Porsche.

 

I'd venture to guess the majority of owners and potential buyers are clueless...

We are enthusiasts.... We hang out on forums and describe our own issues, read all about everyone else's problems as well as great solutions.

Most 996/997 Boxster/Cayman owners and buyers probably wouldn't know an IMS bearing from a donut.

Just to clarify:

 

Is that the LNE donut?

 

I could totally eat a donut right now.

 

I can't confirm or deny this, but I'm pretty sure Flat6 has enough paying customers to keep them busy for the next several years...after all, all those folks who stall their cars at red lights have them flat-bedded out to Flat6 for rebuilds.

You underestimate the power of ignorance and denial. Don't assume that your average Joe who shows up at a Porsche dealer will actually bother to research anything (from maintenance to actual value) before buying. Even those that do read up on what they're buying are going to assume that their car will be "one of the good ones."

It's easy to feel crapped on when you are the one with the busted car, but the reality is that stuff breaks over time. If you answered the doorbell to find the guy who bought your house nine years ago complaining that the roof started leaking and demanding satisfaction, you'd likely give him the finger and encourage him to move along. Why is it so different that a car dealership is going to feel the same way about a vehicle they sold back when Jessica and Ashlee Simpson were in the Top 50, Janet Jackson was having wardrobe malfunctions, and LOST was actually worth watching?

 

Hard to remember, but we -- the Internet Porsche community -- are probably a smallish percentage of Porsche owners. It's likely that many of the issues we take for granted as common knowledge -- IMS bearing, RMS, AOS, intermix -- aren't common knowledge to the non-Internet Porsche owner.

As for Jake trolling the forum, I can't speak to that. But I doubt that a guy with a one year backlog on $20k engine rebuilds really needs to AstroTurf Internet forums to drum up business. And he has said in the past that most of his business is non-Internet Porsche owners.


Goes along with my comments above. Internet forums self select toward people who do extensive research, obsess over details, etc. Now think about your average John or Jane Q. Public who assumes that a $100,000 car is designed and built with an extraordinary level of quality and precision. Now you're telling him that he followed the factory maintenance schedule religiously and his engine self destructed anyway? Yup, he's gonna be pissed.

Personally, I would love to know what the % of 996/997 owners is who know about the issues with he M96/M97 engines. I suspect it's lower than you think it is.

 

{Homer Simpson Voice}

Mmmmm ... donuts ....