Hey sorry it's been forever - but I wanted to respond in case anyone else encounters this in the future. I'm gonna try and make it quick because it's such a long story, but trust me - this is what much of my free time in 2018 was dedicated to, haha. The company has a long list of complaints with the BBB: https://www.bbb.org/us/ks/overland-p...026/complaints

and if I was doing this again, I would not.

1. I got the full bumper to bumper (non exclusionary) policy with Red Shield Automotive when I purchased the car at a dealership. While it wasn't enjoyable to work with them, they did eventually honor the claim after months of hounding by me and the Porsche dealership.

2. They did everything in their power to deny the claim (they denied it a few times until we did a full teardown, which I was on the hook for until it was all wrapped up..more on that later) Essentially, Red Shield wouldn't believe the Porsche dealership couldn't fix the box or wouldn't work on the box, and I assume this is because they don't deal with a lot of PDK failures. The service contracts are written in such a way where there are tons of "outs" to deny a claim on technicalities. The major sticking point for the Warranty company was related to the "cause of failure" clause in their contract. In order to honor the claim, they needed a clear "cause of failure" and they maintained Porsche's durametric info wasn't enough to explain WHY the PDK failed.

We went around and around trying to get to a resolution and get Porsche to produce a clear COF, but they wouldn't do anything beyond the computer diagnostic that indicated a sensor failure on the inside of the box (which seems to be good enough for most Warranty companies, but alas) While Red Sheild wanted a teardown of the transmission (Porsche finally said they would do it for something like $5500?) I was reticent out of fear Red Shield still wouldn't honor a COF and I would now have a doubly broken transmission, be in it for $6K+ AND have to fix it on my own. When I finally did a teardown, it was at AAMCO - and was approved by the warranty company. They opened the box and determined they couldn't fix anything and after another few months of head scratching the determination was made that the only fix was a replacement transmission, and then the car went back to Porsche.

3. Tho as I state above regarding the way these contracts are written and the difficulty of this process..this is also on Porsche. It's not that the Warranty company has specific language about "unserviceable parts" it's that Porsche themselves have made the PDK a non serviceable item. They make it impossible to buy replacement parts from Porsche or ZF. And I feel bad for whomever has to pay for this kind of replacement. The sensor went bad - a bad sensor on a car should not require someone to shell out five figures plus to remedy. When the case was eventually split open, the transmission (which had done nearly 60k miles) was pristine.

 

After all that, how is the car driving?

Agree ZF and Porsche have a weird agreement on PDK, they both seem to want to pass the buck on any repair or replacement parts, and so far I have not heard of any repair shop that handles rebuilds or repair other than full replacement. Every few months someone on here post about the PDK maintenance as well, which seems hard to determine when to perform.