HenryPcar

My 997.2 is now better than the day I first bought it a year ago. Since having bought it, I worked on it extensively and got the car to the condition I like. I enjoy working on my own cars and get satisfaction out of it knowing that I did it right. Almost 40 years ago, I own a BMW E30 which has given me tremendous pleasure. Back then synthetic oil has just appeared on the market and they were terribly expensive. I never used it back then and my E30 got a fossil oil change every 4K miles. The engine never needed rebuild and it was never opened throughout its life that logged over 1/2 million miles. There was no OBD smog test back then. What they did was stick a probe into the tailpipe to get a reading. It finally flunked the smog test and I sure got my money out of that car. Anyway, my point is, with all the state of the art synthetic oils, computerization, PDK, the list goes on and on.......how in the world you see cars having all kinds of problems and some of them have barely hit 50K miles. Perhaps the reason is cars were a lot simpler back then which the BMW E30 represents the minimalist approach. But the current cars, even Porsches are laden with all the luxury features that makes you wonder whether the modern car is really for our enjoyment ? Or is it getting so bloated now that we are being transformed into slaves in constantly visiting the dealership trusting the franchise to do it once and do it right when the car needs any servicing. Do people ever work on their cars now ? I pose this question because it seems if you want to sell your car, you better have one with no more than 30K miles, and having all the paperwork proving it. It seems to be they trust the indies or dealers more than they trust car enthusiasts that do their own work. Yet still you see the postings here addressing all kinds of problems with cars barely reaching 50K miles.

HenryPcar

"There was no OBD smog test back then"

Correction " There was an OBD module, not the likes of today's ODBII where they do away with tailpipe probes.

Petza914

Tons of members here work on their own cars. You also have to consider that in addition to being more complex with more electronics, newer cars have to meet many demands - same or more power from smaller, more fuel efficient engines, ebmnganced safety features without adding weight, consumer demands for comfort and luxury features, etc so its tighter tolerances, lighter weight materials (like plastics), less expensive manufacturing methods, etc.

These are some of the reasons there are similar failures even though technology has progressed. Personally, my feeling is the auto industry jumped the shark about 8 years ago. Why anyone needs a wi-fi hot spot in their vehicle or one that can parallel park itself or gas lane departure warning or laser cruise control etc is just ridiculous. All these safety aids are just making for less safe drivers since they now rely on the car to do all this stuff while they read Email and text messages on their phones behind the wheel. My Cayenne is an 09 and my newest of my 6 cars and I don't have any desire to get a newer, more modern one that I can't fix myself. Working on my '74 914 is so simple, where any problem is either mechanical, or related to air, fuel, or spark.

Dennis C

Tcc1999

BIG smoke

I bought my boys a slightly leaky tin boat. 1967 starcraft 12' car topper. It has a 9o's 9.9 merc two stroke on it.
And when I say weepy, maybe an inch of water over night. The kids need to hand pump it out every day. Every season they flip the boat over, hammer a loose rivet, apply some leak seal.
The engine, you have to mix the fuel 50/1, premium only. They know it last longer and does not absorb water like ethanol. Sully motor starts first pull with the manual choke.
They change the lower unit oil every year, and gap the plugs. The 10 year old one day asked me, "why did you get us such a crappy boat"?
I said it builds boating character. If you don't know what a crappy boat is, you'll never know what a good boat is.
I have has lots of crappy cars. Some were push start. Like push the car, drop the clutch in second, to get the motor running. Some didn't have power brakes, manual windows, no air conditioning, no radio, only AM radio,
manual locks. What do I like in a car now? power brakes, front vented rotors, maybe even 4 vented rotors, power locks, power windows, maybe cruise control, am/fm/cd maybe mp3. ABS is nice.
sonar parking lane departure $1500 mirror/ea? pass. 8 foot, 300 lbs pano roof? pass? leather dash, door, a/b/c/d pillar? pass?
I want less things that break, more things that I can fix, less things that five lab coat guys need to repair.
I don't want too old, I don't want too new.

HenryPcar

Perhaps my 997.2, fostering by a car care nut like me might one day reach 1/2 million miles .........if I could live that long :>)

HenryPcar

I agree, a combination of over-engineering and customer demand features in a car now that is getting less and less repairable. On one hand our car is getting more and more powerful and yet it negates the power-to-weight ratio for being laden with all the luxury and needless over-engineering. Take this for an example : https://tagmotorsports.com/techart-n...system-for-991. Pity the DIY having to fix any problem arising from it. From where I'm sitting, perhaps even dealers would have a hard time working on it. All that over-engineering, expense (over $7K) and additional weight just to be able to lift the front end, and yet apparently there is a market for it because TechArt sells it.

Petza914

Funny, as I actually have the cargraphic version of this noselift which uses air rather than hydraulics, and it's one of the best aftermarket accessories I bought for my car as far as being able to enjoy the car. Having the ability to ascend or descend steep driveways without scraping the front of the car and to clear speed bumps means you don't have to worry about whether you should take the 997 or something else and what if the good parking spots are taken and all that are left are the ones in that lot with the steep driveway. I looked at the TechArt one and the KW one before deciding on the cargraphic and picked the AirLift because should there be a failure in the pump or pressure lines, I'd much rather have air spraying all around my frunk than hydraulic fluid.


Remote inside the car sends the signal to the control box which activates the external compressor and inflates the black airbag shown at the top of the Bilstein shock, which lifts the body of the car about 1" at the strut, which translates to about 2.5" at the front nose. The RUF front bumper on my car does not have a lower lip and it projects further forward than any of the other OEM bumpers, including the Aero one, which means it would scrape even sooner than a stock bumper as the wheels are further away from the bumper's impact point.

Though I needed to mount the control box and an external compressor (you can use the spare tire pump, but then it takes about 3x as long to lift the nose and isn't as reliable) I was able to fit all of it under the frunk beaty panels by installing an Optima sealed battery that is smaller than the OEM battery but has AGM performance with similar specs - no issues going on 4 years now. The compressor is silver to the left of the battery and the control box is the black box to the left of the compressor.

Marv

Look, much of this is driven by changes in CAFE standards and safety requirements. Porsche has made it a given that each new model will be faster and still meet government requirements. That's a remarkable achievement.

The downside is that it means more technology needs to be packed under the hood and servicing rapidly becomes a thing of the past for the shade tree mechanic. Sure, 40 or so years ago it was simple to diagnose an engine fault, but long gone are the days when anyone needed to pull a choke lever on their dash or worry about flooding their engine (which was easy to do even with an automatic choke). And your new car always starts no matter how cold or wet it is outside.

You may have put 500K+ miles on your old BMW, but that wasn't the norm back then. In the 1970s and 1980s, getting 100K out of a typical car was doing damn good. If the engine didn't expire the car rusted to a pulp by then. When's the last time you stopped into Pep Boys to buy a body patch kit to fix a rust hole?

You are right that creature comfort creep is a little out of control, but the baby boomers' kids are out of school and moved out of the homes some time ago and most of those boomers have done a pretty good job at acquiring some disposable income. Just look what happened to the air cooled 911 prices in the last 5 or so years. Yeah, they have money to spend, but they're also getting up in the years and backs and knees don't work like they did when they were 20. So, the people with the money want a little more comfort and some bragging rights when it comes to technology in new cars. It's just the manufactures following the market. And the 20 and 30 something don't want to be left out either, so the great tech flood is even gushing its way down into entry level cars, too. Everyone wants NAV, iPhone Apple Play and connectivity on demand. Welcome to the 21st Century.

HenryPcar

Thumbs up to you if you did this mod yourself. Your DIY resources are on par with any indy shops or dealership if not surpassing them in being able to work on these high-tech mods. Using the TechArt kit as an example, you just saved yourself over 10 grands ($8000 for the kit, plus labor) for doing it yourself and knowingly you did it right.

HenryPcar

"You may have put 500K+ miles on your old BMW, but that wasn't the norm back then. In the 1970s and 1980s, getting 100K out of a typical car was doing damn good. If the engine didn't expire the car rusted to a pulp by then. When's the last time you stopped into Pep Boys to buy a body patch kit to fix a rust hole?"

That BMW E30 was a California car and with reasonable care, rusting rarely happens I typically log 2000 miles a week going back and forth from LA to SF while on contractual assignment. Hence it was almost all freeway miles. Basically that was my commuter car, albeit long-distance.

DesmoSD

There is definitely something special about 80-90's cars. They were still analog with manufactures were more free with their design and engineering. The EPA, C.A.R.B, NHTSA really changed things in the 90's affecting the way cars are today, some good, some bad depends on how you see it. Car's today have too many sensors, too many safety features and stricter requirements.

I still have my 93.5 Supra TT 6 spd OBDI and thing is a legend. I actually have to smog it in Sept so that sucks. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing being very over-engineered yet tamed due to the gentlemen's agreement of Japan. Very easy to work and extremely bulletproof.