deilenberger

"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." Me.. You seem to be attributing it to both - so I'm confused. Incompetent or greedy?

Engineering fooked up. They seem to have done better on the 958 series. It happens. The bearing support seems more effected by time than miles - and that's a lot harder to test for - it's difficult to put "time" on a part.

And the Jimi fix hasn't proven superior to the factory design - yet. I believe the most I've heard of someone having on it is around 15,000 miles or so. I know of no one who had the shaft bearing support die at 15,000 miles. Mine made it to 10 years and around 85,000 miles. Funny thing is - the battery in the P!G was still the original (and still is as far as I know..) so some parts are quite long lasting. Others not so much.

Spyerx

Whelp... had a small problem on my 958. Only issue aside from a small emissions problem that you may have heard about.... on 3rd clock, but i've a drivers seatbelt receptacle that latches about 50% of the time. Doesn't come loose once locked but dealer has a new one coming.

This car has been rock solid reliable, just had 35k mile oil change done.

joepjoep

ditto. '05 CS and I only just replaced my battery this Spring around 110ish k. But I also did a heart & short soul block replaced @50k 01/12 so...

The Cardan shaft is next up for me... But at 127k so .... over all pretty reliable for what I put it through.

Miamirice

There is something else here not being mentioned and that's the complexity required to service parts on European manufactured cars. I own a CS that I bought cheap to tow race cars with. Anything I service from the battery to the windshield washer bottle on the CS is silly. Clearly the design never considered "simplicity of service" as a goal. When I wrench on the Japanese cars I have I need 3 metric wrenches and a lot less patience for BS. (why have triple squares AND torx)

Dan87951

It's no secret my BMW ownership was a complete nightmare and was the worst reliable car we have ever owned. At the time, my 20 year old 928's were more reliable than that bavarian shxt box. Phenomenal car to drive though but what's the point if you can never drive it (always broke).

Now your getting it. However, your comparison is flawed. If you own a Cayenne its not a matter of "if" its a matter of "when" you will be replacing the coolant T's, coolant pipes, driveshaft, and coolant over flow tank. Every Cayenne will experience these failures. At least with the 996 and 928 there is some hope you may never come across an IMS or thrust bearing failure during ownership. I have owned 8 928's so far and none of them have had thrust bearing failures (yet).

tjrob2000

Therein you state the problem. It's one thing to have a community there to help folks diagnose unusual problems or newbies with maintenance. It should not be to help fix problems that never should have occurred.

deilenberger

It's the nature of the beast.. every euro car forum I know of tends to have a lot of activity on how to fix the damn things.. and a Lexus forum I joined is primarily about "where to hide the owners manual" "what's in your glovebox?" "do you drive with the sunroof open or closed" sort of posts. Totally boring.

If you want interesting to drive and "interesting"* to own - euro cars.
If you just want to drive - Japanese, specifically Lexus.

* = "interesting" not in a good way, like the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times.."

Snipe656

I have not really noticed that with Mercedes but maybe it was just the models we have owned. I see it for our 300SD but that is a really old car and more expected. Did not see it for the 2013 ML and not yet for the 2015 C. The communities in general for MBZ feel so much more dead compared to Porsche or BMW ones. In my experience the BMW online communities have the most traffic(and by a lot more than Porsche or MBZ) but also in my ownership experience BMW has been the absolute worst.

Miamirice

Any of the activities you are describing here are "daily driving". Far more impressive is the number of Mazda Miatas that run 24-hour races for years on the original motor. Until you run anything on a race track you realize how much more abuse is engineered into a good car. I have 2 Honda S2000 that spend all there time between 6400-9200 RPM. Producing 120 hp per liter (do the math on your Ceyenne motor displacement). The motor design is from the year 2000 and today I thing only the Ferrari 458 matches it for this hp per liter NA. The Honda forum is full of s2000 drivers who have over 200,000 miles. Very impressive for a motor designed to run at that RPM. My racing partner who is a Porsche mechanic tells me the IMS bearing fix on the 996's is just a bandaid. He says the real issue is the shaft diameter was not big enough- poor engineering.

FWIW- if I have a choice to buy a used car - I will by the one that spends its time on the highway at high speed as you describe over the one that "putters around town"

Snipe656

Most Cayennes around here are glorified soccer mom mobiles that I doubt see a total of 20 miles a day. I get rather baffled looks from the service departments when they notice how quickly I rack the miles on mine and I am driving a lot less these days than past years. Just a damn shame mine stops making boost most of the time after driving around 40 miles and only response I can get from dealers after months of fighting is "the factory should have a software fix 'soon'".

996tnz

Ouch! Monday car? Abusive previous owner? Modded? I had an '01 allroad with the 3rd row rearfacing kids seat. Bought around 85K miles, ran to 130K (when a misladen trailer threw a car into the side of her). One failed air suspension compressor and one coolant tank was the total damage up until then - not even any trim items. OK, no other damage except one air shock that died when I'd loaned the car to visiting family and they had an accident with it. Otherwise zero, nada, issues whatsoever in that time. My 996T was still at the workshop when I'd entered a Porsche club Gymkhana (think tight autocross) and this wagon placed 4th out of a field of one Audi and 24 Porsches. Held its alignment that whole time too despite plenty of action. Interior still looked new too, though perhaps that was a good indication that it had had proper care and maintenance all its life.

Some individual cars are just cursed though, and yours could be something as simple as an unseen wiring loom shorting or whatever, while workshops keep replacing bits in an effort to sort it.

996tnz

Because profit. Re-engineering a part that fails in testing is more expensive than letting owners carry the can, as long as it is sufficiently unlikely to fail within the first three years. From around the late 90s onwards Porsche was (is?) making the biggest percentage profit margins in the industry. Too new to Cayenne ownership have suffered, but not new to Porsche ownership so here's one of the earlier examples. Glue is probably a cheaper way to bond coolant pipes into blocks than collaring or cryo-fitting for instance, so cue the 996 and 997.1 GT3 and Turbo coolant fitting blowout fiascos that have cost many owners many thousands. And what looks to have been a snow-job of the NHTSA investigation.

And because regulation. Safety and environmental (fuel economy) regulatory requirements are preventing the kind of solid over-engineering that was once the norm for Porsche. More safety typically means adding weight (plus reducing driver control), but fuel economy standards push for lower weights. So non safety critical parts are put on a crash diet. Cue more stressed plastic parts (coolant pipes, door stays etc) to save weight where it's not safety critical. Exciting, safe, fuel-efficient, reliable, cheap - pick any four at most. Of course if we were willing to pay twice as much to have twice the reliability that would play to Porsche's traditional strengths, but very few of us would take them up on that (and the same temptation would remain for them to just put up a credible show and pocket the difference).

Also, because sales competition and media. It may seem that reliability is a sales trump card, and it is certainly helpful, but it is also quite a fragile marketing platform. Look at the hit Toyota took recently with recalls.
Perceived safety, the driving experience, utility, and any prestige value hit harder in the showrooms, in advertising and in new car reviews. So when a company like Porsche has a choice of spending R&D on either a better driving experience, cheaper manufacturing, or higher reliability one of those first two will normally get the nod.

Lastly, reliability is a two-edged sword for a car company. Perhaps not as much as with computers, but higher maintenance and repair costs on the existing steed often drive new car purchases. And if they stubbornly stick with the old, aftermarket parts and servicing is a profitable business in its own right - so why cut off your own nose?

Now Porsche almost died earlier in the 90's due to insufficient focus on profitability, so it's perhaps just been forgivable over-compensation on that front. Personally, I'd happily live with a few continued reliability fiascos (they seem to have relatively few failures but boy are the common ones doozys) if Porsche weren't becoming more and more like Lexus on the driving front instead. Most of the decline is pushed along by those same safety and environmental pressures of course (and supercharged by US litigation) but I like my sportscars to be responsive, not obstructive. Which - for me - means a proper handbrake that can be used on the move, fully defeatable stability control, gas and brake available together for balancing the car in corner with both feet, no artificial lag on throttle lift, no 'brake assistance' messing with my inputs, no artificial gas pedal response flat spots etc, and no 'ice mode' that cuts braking to something like 20 or 30% max when the car decides it's on ice (even if actually approaching turn one on a race track).

All just in my opinion of course. Porsche I do love you, really I do. Now if only the real Porsche would just please step back out from behind the curtain...

RKD in OKC

Note on 05 Turbo headlight wiring. Picked up a new to me 05 CT and within a month the headlights went out. Had to get new headlight assemblies and the short wiring harnesses for both. The wire insulation was dried out and falling off. Googled and found most HID headlights not just Porsche made in the mid 2000's have the same problems. HID Headlights getting hotter than wiring was designed for.

ProgRockJunkie

Thanks for that. First time I've been the least bit grateful I don't have HID's.

b-man

I have a Cayenne Diesel that I got new in September 2015, right before the VW diesel scandal. It was made to my specs.

So right now, it is almost 14 months old (with about 24k miles on it). I have been back to the dealership for warranty repairs about 10 or 15 times. Honestly, it's been so many times that I have lost count.

As a point of comparison, I bought a new Acura RDX (2015 model year) for my wife a few months before I got this Cayenne. The Acura has not had a single problem. Let me make that more clear--I have not been back to the Acura dealer once.

If you compare the size, performance, comfort features, etc. of the 2 vehicles, they are almost identical. Actually, the Acura is probably a better performance vehicle. It handles great and would probably beat the Cayenne in a race (on a track or drag race).

But the price I paid for the Acura RDX is exactly 50% of what I paid for the Cayenne.

Many people buy Porsches primarily because they buy into Porsche's advertising and marketing, not because they know cars or want a quality product. I used to think they were uninformed fools, with more money than sense. But now I realize that I may be one of them!

This is not my first Porsche, but I cannot imagine buying another.

b-man