[CenterIsl]

I'm paying attention to this issue as well - really hoping for some objective statistics. Clearly the resale prices on 986 / 996 cars (and even 987 / 997) have suffered because of this issue, which I benefited from when I bought my car a year ago. And I'd love to truly believe that this is a non-issue. Poking around, I have come up with (in ascending sample order):

1) my mechanic (Squires in Bellevue) has seen one IMS failure ever, and they have worked on many (more than a hundred?) Boxsters, obviously all out of warranty.

2) MSN Autos has 629 user reviews (just checking 986s) and just 3 reported engine failures that I could find:
(year) (reviews)
1997 - 42
1998 - 32
1999 - 74 - "lost an engine", "blown engine"
2000 - 113 - "(heard about blown engines)"
2001 - 180
2002 - 103 - "engine failure (timing chain broke)"
2003 - 56
2004 - 29

3) Consumer Reports Reliability History for all Boxsters "Engine Major" compared to "average":
2000 - Better
2001 - Much Better
2002 - Much Worse
2003 - Average
2004 - (not enough data)
2005 - Worse
2006 - Better
2007 - Average
2008 - Much Better

4) Porsche's use of the IMS design for 12 years and hundreds of thousands of M96 motors. Sure, they revised the bearing - but they revise almost everything in these cars. Offhand, I think there were as many cupholder revisions as IMS revisions in that period. We all know that Porsche is the only one who knows what the true failure rate is, but think about it - do you really think they would have continued to build IMS engines for more than a decade if they really experienced a...10% failure rate? Beancounters or engineers, these guys have kept meticulous records for half a century and - IMHO - their slowness to move away from the IMS design is perhaps the biggest telling factor in just how significant this problem is.