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I'm trying to figure out if I'm one of the culprits here that are "full of spite, malice or greed." But while I work that out, I just have to throw this out there...
I agree, the numbers are clearly relatively small. But for those folks with suddenly stuck with the ton of scrap I alluded to earlier (especially those who bought the car new, have had it only a handful of years, and have put under 40 or 50k miles on it), that number suddenly becomes 100%. That's just not right, and if you can't understand that, I confess that I just don't understand how your mind works.
A lot of people seem to have this notion that Porsche makes racing machines and that if you buy one, you really ought to be tracking it AND (whether or not you track it) you need to be ready and willing to throw LOTS of effort and/or money into it to keep it running. I've owned mine (and have read forums such as this one) long enough to understand that. And though I don't have the annual income of a lot of folks that have posted on this board, I've even come to accept much of the uncertainty that comes with owning a European-made sports car. But lots of people who are simply in the market for a snazzy, good-looking two-seater that's also a helluva lot of fun to drive don't think that way. Blame Japanese car reliability, whatever, but people have come to expect more from a car that they bought new.
When an IMSB goes kaput and the very expensive engine wrapped around that bearing proceeds to destroy itself in the blink of an eye, it IS a big deal to the person who, just a short number of years before dropped a pretty good-sized chunk of change on it to buy new. This isn't a battery that dies 2 months after the warranty runs out. It's not even analagous to the early Ford Tauruses who's automatic transmission suddenly quit doing their job and needed replacing. You might grumble about it, you'd feel a pinch in your wallet for awhile, but still---THAT you could fix for $1500 and still have a car that went for another 100k miles. And I'm not so sure the timing belt analogy applies here. For one thing, they (in the vast number of cases) last WAY longer than some (a few, granted) M96 engines. For another, they're not particularly expensive to replace in a preventative maintenance fashion. And for those rare cases where they do snap 20k or 30k into the life of the car (or the life of the most recent belt), I think the owners probably do have grounds to take legal action. They probably don't because of the time and hassle that would entail, and because, when you get right down to it, typically those engines aren't all that expensive to replace. With the M96 it's a whole different ballgame.
For people who find themselves in that boat, this is NOT about being "full of spite, malice or greed." It's about Porsche (to whom those very descriptors might very reasonably be applied) doing the right thing...something they don't seem particularly inclined to do.
[Haven't read the BMW reference yet---I gotta go to work!]
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