Quote:
Originally Posted by NoGaBiker
While I respect your expertise as a Porsche mechanic (an expertise I absolutely do not share) I have to ask you to respect mine as a statistician. And I have to say this doesn't make any sense.
I'm not saying it's NOT 10-20 percent; I'm only saying that unless all 200,000 Boxsters are regularly serviced at your shop, you can't possibly have any idea what percentage of the total Boxster population is affected by IMS woes. Yes, perhaps 20% of the Boxsters you see have IMS failure. But is your clientele a representative sampling? Perhaps you have a reputation as a great IMS bearing expert, so everybody within 100 miles of you who has an IMS failure comes to see you. Then you would be seeing 100% of the problem cars in your area, and every other shop would be seeing 0% of the problem cars. (I'm exaggerating for emphasis.) So if we asked them, the failure rate is 0%, and if we ask you, it's a huge number.
I went to Jim Ellis Porsche last year to ask about an LN install on my '04. They are LN authorized installers. I was basically saying, "Tell me I need to do this and I'll give you $3000 or so to do it." The Service Writer talked with me a long time. He had been there 4.5 years. In that time they had dealt with 5 M96s with failed IMS bearings, and two of them were late model 997s. His words in conclusion? "If I was buying an 03 or newer Boxster right now there's no way on earth I'd have the IMS replaced unless the car was showing signs of needing it."
So your two stories are wildly different. I don't believe either of you is lying or even leaving part of the truth out. I believe neither of you has enough of the story to draw any sort of statistically relevant data.
thanks,
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The service manager at that same dealership told the prospective buyer calling to schedule a PPI of my 2000 996 with 65k miles that my car wouldn't last another 5 to 10k miles before the IMS bearing failed, but we can put you into a CPO 997 for 2.5 times the money. He didn't buy my car, but the guy who did over two years ago is still going strong. He uses the same indy I do anbd he hasn't had an IMS failure. I changed the oil every 5k miles just out of old habits, not knowing it would eventually probably be the reason I haven't had a failure. My point to that is you can't trust Jim Ellis Porsche for anything.
Jim Ellis replaced a lot of M96 engines under warranty. Every Porsche dealer did. Porsche and the dealers got really good in turning around the engines as rebuilds and this to cars all with less than 50k miles. I've been driving M96 cars since 99 and I know a lot of people that had them fail, although I haven't had one go yet, and my 986S has one of Jake Raby's engines, so I'm not worried about it failing.
Porsche actually has good numbers but they aren't sharing. You can bet their statistical models indicated a serious issue or they would not have redesigned the IMS over and over and over until finally eliminating it altogether 12 years after the first of the water pumpers hit the streets.