This is my first car with PASM. For those of you with more experience, what is the failure mode and how many miles before service or replacement is required?

 

61K miles on a 987.1 Cayman S with PASM.

No issues whatsoever.

 

I have had a few cars in the shop with 60,000+ miles that wanted to swap out springs - so i had an opportunity to hand test the PASM shock - both cases really firm, they felt stiff like new pss-9's - of course that means nothing since its a very subjective test, but i have also taken shocks off older 911's where the shock had zero dampening - i mean you can compress the shocks with a finger. :-)

Cheers

Mike

 

I have owned 5 Porsches with PASM, and never had any issues with them. They were maintenance free and trouble free. I think the longest one I owned had close to 70k miles and never had any issue in any of them. great system. Mark

 

I think longevity depends heavily and the amount and intensity of track use. At least one PASM shock in my 997.1 C2S appears to have gone bad, to the point where the car was trying to kill me. We still have the shocks, so maybe we should test them, though we're pretty sure the issue is shock(s) rather than something else. We replaced them with 1-way Ohlins, which we could never get dialed in, and have replaced them again with MCS 2-way, which we're still trying to dial in. In hindsight, the better thing to do would have been to test the PASM shocks and replace any that were bad. With a little alignment tweak, the car was great on both road and track with those PASM shocks.

 

Seems hard to beat Porsche tuning, especially if using a shock that is generically valved. When I changed to Nitrons on my Lotus, I went with singles to keep things simple for me. Are they valved as good as Lotus could have done with the same quality shock and spring rate? Probably not, but Nitron has a lot of experience with Lotus and the hardware quality is far above OEM. VERY happy with how it turned out, especially since I didn't pick too crazy of a spring rate for street / track mixed use (450# f / 600# rear). Car doesn't have the ultimate grip of the GT4, but boy does it handle sweetly.

With my GT4, it seems hard to beat what Porsche have done, since I have no desire to increase the spring rate. That said PASM takes some getting used to compared to conventional shocks which I've had on every single other car.