Johsyv

Iīm considering a 98 2.5 Boxster which has 78 000 miles on it.
Itīs in good shape except the driver seat which is slightly worn and it has a big hole on the left side. The interior looks good otherwise. The clutch was just replaced and it uses about 0,5L oil for every 3500 miles.
The car has been imported from USA to Norway(where I live). Fully documented service record from itīs 6 years in Norway, but very little history from USA.

Is the hole in the seat and oil consumption normal for this car with that milaege?
Are there any good ways/tricks to tell the ca mileage of a 986(So that you atleast can get an impression)?

Really looking forward to buy my first Boxster after a bunch of different 944s!

Macster

Seats get exposed to all sorts of wear and tear. Both of my cars seats are intact but the Boxster passenger seat has scratches from carrying a folding bicycle in the seat and I noticed today the side of driver's seat back has some scratches even though I'm careful to not carry anything sharp in my pockets. The Turbo driver seat back and the back seats have some minor damage, minor scratches, from me carrying a folding wheel chair there when I was taking care of my elderly parents.

I've been told to look at the gas pedal, brake and clutch pedal wear but it is hard to judge what's reasonable. Mainly you want to avoid seeing lots of wear with low miles, or no wear, as maybe the pedal covers were replaced to remove the pedal covers with a horrific amount of wear.

Same with the driver's side carpet. I've worn a hole through the driver's side floor mat but my car has over 305K miles on it. (And I'm too cheap to buy a new floor mat.)

About all that is left is to have the DME engine run time along with the over rev counters and time stamps read out. You divide the odometer reading by the run time to get average speed. Approx. 30mph is "average". Much higher is a highway car -- like cars used by traveling salesmen (came upon a Cayenne owner who drove his vehicle up and down the west coast and the vehicle had over 300K miles) -- or tracked cars but generally these cars have a high average speed but lower than average miles. (From what I gather Porsche considers average annual miles usage to be in the 6K to 9K range.)

A lower than 30mph average can be a town car, one used for leisurely Sunday drives.

A real low average speed could be a car with a tampered with odometer. My 2nd hand info is where tampering is often involved is in leased cars to roll the mileage back to avoid having to pay a penalty for too many miles. Say for a 4 year lease the annual mileage limit is 10K miles but the owner has driven 12K miles per year. The odometer will be rolled back from 48K miles to say 40.3K miles unless the owner gets greedy and rolls it back under 40K miles.

In this case the car covered 48K miles at let's say 30mph average speed. Thus the engine run time would be 1600 hours. (48K divided by 30mph equals 1600 hours.)

So the odometer is rolled back to 40.3K miles. Now when 40.3K is divided by 1600 the average speed becomes 25mph. Not super low. And frankly for a car with some reasonable servicing the difference in miles while fraudulent is not a big problem. Trouble is you won't find any servicing records as the owner might not have had the car serviced -- to avoid a paper trail of mileage.

Another scenario is -- and this is where you might encounter some serious odometer tampering is a "high mileage" car, say one with over 100K miles, is rolled back to under 100K miles. Say a 150K mile car is rolled back to -- just a number 78K miles. Assuming a 30mph average with 150K miles the engine run time would be 5000 hours.

But with the odometer rolled back to 78K miles, 5000 divided into 78K gives an average speed of just 15.6 mph. That's pretty low. And generally the aforementioned Sunday driver doesn't rack up but a few K miles per year. He wouldn't have the time to rack up much more at just a piddly 15mph average speed. And the Sunday driver likely has every invoice for every thing he ever had done to the car too. (When I researched a low miles -- 10K miles -- used 2003 Turbo in 2009 I called around and found several local dealerships that had serviced the car and found out at what miles and approx time the car had been in and was quite satisfied the car had received reasonable servicing and the mileage was real. And the car's condition was pristine, like new.)

Bottom line is unless the odometer tampering has even occurred and is egregious you can't know it has happened without some highly specialized research.

As for oil consumption 0.5l every 3500 miles ain't bad. Oil consumption is dependent to some extent on usage, how long the oil is run, the type of oil.

I wouldn't worry about the oil consumption.

I'm not really sure you have anything to worry about regarding the car's mileage, either.

Be sure the body water drains are free of trash. There are two one on either side of the battery box under the front trunk lid. You have to remove the plastic covers to get at the drains.

For the rear of the car there is a body water drain on either side of the top under where the clam shell arm resides. You'll have to put the top in its service position to get at the rear body water drains.

Be sure the radiator ducts are kept free of trash. If this gets too bad you'll have to remove the bumper cover and carefully unbolt and move the A/C condenser -- one on each side -- out the way to remove the trash.

That 2 year brake/clutch (if a manual transmission equipped car) fluid flush/bleed is important too.

kderry

A good PPI will tell a lot. The fact that it burns oil is enough to make me walk away.
My '99 with 95k miles doesn't burn any oil at all.

The odometers mileage is heavily encoded and tampering is unlikely. However, one could simply swap instrument clusters as the mileage is stored there. If this has occurred, it will be evident by mismatched VINs stored in the cluster and DME.
A proper scan tool would also pick it up at the PPI.

Macster

Come on? 0.5l of oil in 3500 miles? That's nothing.

A good PPI is important I agree. There are more issues to be worried about that just odometer tampering and a lot more common too.

There are ways to tamper with the odometer that are pretty much undetectable.

But odometer tampering is not that common.

gyuill

The odometer mileage is very easy to change. The coding has been broken for a long time. I can change the odo to any value I like in around 5 minutes.

Engine hours in the ecu are the best tell tale as previously noted.