As with Beck...The car used oil as well. Porsche sets a limit for oil usage for warranty work. (I can't remember now what that limit was for these cars...seems like it was around 500 mi per qt...) My car was always right at or just below that limit. The only way a dealership has of knowing what a car is using they require that every qt of oil that's put in one be put in by a dealership. And it has to be done over a certain period of time as well. The inconvenience of this (to me) made it not worth the hassle. It's just not possible to use a car if every 500 miles it has to be taken by a dealership. If one thinks about it...One realizes that to drive cross country on a trip...they'd have to have a Porsche Dealership Directory with them and every tank and a half of fuel...Find a Porsche dealership as well for oil. I couldn't do that so I just put oil in it myself and said forget about it. But...that didn't keep me from talking worrying about it.

The slapping began at around 35k miles. But...it only did it after the car had set for a while...a week or two. So...on order to replicate the problem...they would have to have heard it start after sitting.

Between the oil and then the slapping noise...I was just ready to sell it. I'd already talked to them about it and they assured me everything was great. That didn't alleviate my fear of losing an engine after another year or two.

I said screw it. Sold it and bought a boat.

 

Trust me, get a new battery! I made the mistake, when my OEM battery died, of replacing it with a Walmart battery based on suggestions from the board. It died about 3 weeks after the return date and trying to get it replaced was a complete PITA. Luckily, AMEX gave me a credit and I dropped an OEM battery in and haven't had any troubles. Lesson learned!

 

Outside of 2005 models, 997.1 and 997.2 BOTH are extremely reliable, specially being a high performance sports car. There aren't too many .2 cars with high mileage, but there are a ton of high mileage 997.1 cars with no major issues.

I think one should be safe enough driving either until the wheels fall off, the biggest cost on these cars are usually TIRES as was proven by a Turbo car log that did hundreds of thousands of miles.

 

Bore scoring reports have increased greatly this year. I have these documented in the mid west mostly, with some reports from Salt Lake City as well.

It all just takes a while to surface for most people. I saw my first scored 9a1 bore in 2010.

 

yep. There's hidden costs in these cars. Tires is a .... i found it to be ridiculous. Mine never even seemed to make it to the tread bars without a puncture or something. I think i got about 10k miles out of a set of rears. And who likes mixing tires?

Such is the price. They're not Chevrolets. But...that's why we pay.

 

I've read where there were changes in '09 that increased cooling (and/or lubrication) to the no. 6 cylinder. I can find it and try and post it but you'd know...do you think these changes helped?


Fwiw...i know this is far from scientific. ..but I get the sense that these aren't as troubling as back 8 years ago or so. Then, on this forum there was more buzz about this as opposed to now. There were several of us that had had engine swaps (some had had 2 swaps). It was more prevalent than just reading threads would suggest because the guys (like me) who'd had problems just emailed each other to talk about it rather than to post post to the world that their car was one of the ones having problems.

There was also some talk about some of the replacement gen 1 engines had even had the gen 2 engine changes already in place....

 

If you ever submit a post with encouraging information I'll assume you got a job with Porsche. With all the modes of failure you've outlined I don't know how any of these cars are still on the road.

 

I'll be the first to tell you that all we see are bad cases, so what we experience is always from a failure point of view. Most engines will never have an issue, but some do, and they usually end up here, or at least in my failure log book.

We don't do oil services, and we don't work on other parts of the car. With the exception of a random few elective big bore performer builds that we do annually, everything else we touch has broken internally.

 

A round-about discussion in Jake's defense ...

Background: I've designed industrial controls for 37 years. Downtime on these machines can be many thousands of dollars an hour. The controls have to work.

Mathematically, our MTBF is several hundreds of years. Of course this is absurd, as not one of the controls will last that long. But they are very reliable, like the 9A1 motor.

We are the central clearing house for all problems with our systems. Any major problem comes to us. Sometimes, per scheduled downtime, we get systems back for upgrading.

Sort of like Jake, in a way.

Every now and then I hire a new employee. Out of 50,000 systems, we get a couple systems a week back (100 a year, divided into 50,000 yields 500 years mean time between failure). The new employee thinks the sky is falling with all these repairs.

Jake sees the same thing. 5, 10, maybe 20 cases over the last 6 years with tens of thousands of motors running in all kinds of conditions, abuse, and neglect.

It is a matter of scale.

Scale ... is very hard to determine when you are in the middle of things. Reporting on your experiences is usually void of scale. Jake, I am using "you" universally and not meaning you specifically. But to Forum members, you are included as well.

It is kind of Jake to supply any information. His data scares us, We don't like it. But it is good to have.

The interesting thing is to look for clusters in Jake's data. Midwest and Salt Lake City? Could this be climate? Gas problems? Too much ethanol? Do Mormons not believe in oil changes? Are the air filters clogging? Are sprayed pesticides entering our motors?

These days I generally find my clusters during tropical storms and in war zones.

The clusters can tell us how to modify product (our cars) to prevent problems in the future! With highly reliable systems, cluster analysis is about the only path toward improvement and preventative measures.

I mentioned cold climate concerns buying a car (before). Jake has pointed out that the 997.1 bore scoring is seen in cold climates only. We can learn from this information. If you buy a cold climate car, include a scope in the PPI. If you drive in a cold climate, warm up carefully. Perhaps a warming blanket on the block?

What can we learn from Jake's views on the 9A1?

Jake ... we would love it if you filled in the gaps. Exact percentages of failure. Exact cause. How to avoid any failure. This is tough and takes time. Some of this information Jake will consider proprietary. He has a right to this.

The 9A1 does have improved cooling, controlled oil pressure, internal sump, fewer parts, ... what does the necropsy of a damaged motor look like?

The 9A1 seems to have a very very low percentage of failures. The data may be too small to be meaningful at all! Refer to clusters above.

Hang with us Jake, even when you scare us and we recoil.

Between all of us, it is our challenge to see between the lines to determine what extra care we can supply that can extend our joy ...

OP ... Go out and find your unicorn!

 

Obviously I am not an expert like Jake, but anecdotally from what I've seen locally, in the club races, and compared to personal and friends experiences of Audis and BMWs, 997 engine (even .1) is BULLETPROOF, comparatively, for a higher performance car that also sees track.

Literally no other high performance car outside of Honda S2000 have been as trouble-free for people who drive aggressively and track. The only downside is that when things go wrong, it's costly, and that should be expected.

PS. Not to say all Porsches are the same. Cayenne first gen is notorious to be an incredibly unreliable car that sometimes' not even worth if it was free

 

'09-'12 997.2
2S
Manual
Sport chrono
Sport seats

They're about as rare as one!! (But that's half the fun! )

Great analogies Wayne!

 

Clusters of failures: Even clusters can cause confusion, because no data is perfectly spread out. There are always clusters, spikes, dips, etc. They can mean something, but they can just be a product of how numbers, data and events happen (which is often not even and according to an average, which is never a predictor).

Still, what we have on line is a failure to perceive the true % of failures.

Since the interwebs got full of sites dedicated to different cars, I can't remember the last time I investigated a make/model and then purchased a specific make/model and didn;t go, "WTF... every car has a dark shadow looming over it!"

Most purchases were high-performance: Audis, BMWs, Infiniti G35, Celica GTS.... and the feeling from surfing the sites dedicated to those cars was the exact same as here. Do I even need to get into Audi issues? Lol. Modern BMWs can't keep a head gasket from blowing... and that results in a hot spot... and that results in warped aluminum... and then that results in... cha-ching!

But look at the Celica GTS and Infiniti G35. Japanese quality and no reason to see those two specific cars as anything but smart purchases for reliability.... but...

Get on the message boards for those cars (any car) and suddenly you'll feel like it's only a matter of time before one of your cylinders suffers oil starvation, because on the G35 there was one cylinder to worry about, and on the GTS it was cylinder #3...or 4....or who knows.

When it comes to engine reliability, and just about anything, nothing you do guarantees the outcome. All you can do by servicing and running the car right is move the odds. There will be an engine failure to someone who is in the top 1% for care/service/etc, but there might be 100 failures for people in the bottom 1% of care/service/etc.

Quite frankly, I've met many ''enthusiasts" and too many self-proclaimed enthusiasts lack basic knowledge (we're talking simple things like the danger of ice cold engines, ice cold oil, or not knowig what rev matching is, etc).

I drive past some very expensive communities on my drive.... and on cold days, like 15 degrees in the morning, there are numerous expensive German cars FAR from warmed up, and these dopes are hammering these cars, 'cause they're late for that meeting, or the kid is late for school... WHATEVER.

The guy next door to me was the owner of a 2012 Turbo S... and he was an enthusiast. He really presented himself that way. Two years into his ownership, he didn't know he had all-wheel drive unti I said something about the weather and said, "Well, at least you have all-wheel drive." His jaw hung low. He though he "...had the same suspension as a GT3..." My internal thought was, "I can't even..."

I value little of what people say and how they present themselves.

Buying a car? Yeah... get to know the owner... but get the tools and diagnostic equipment out for the cars.

People are idiots. And in Porsche world, those idiots create some very expensive problems -- sometimes for themselves... sometimes for the next guy.

.
.

 

09 997.2 C2 with PDK. There were a few fuel pump failures early on due to defective parts, so Porsche elected to replace the ones on the rest of the impacted models. Mine was working fine, but they replaced it anyway.

 

Philster and Wayne, great posts!

Philster, you have turbo wheels on your car so doesn't that give you AWD? lol

dgcate, good luck and let us know when you find your 997.2!

 

Good luck finding your 997.2!

Question: since you are looking for a manual, why would you want Sport Chrono? AFAIK, the only real benefit of having it is the launch control function when combined with the PDK