Boxster water pump - Laso ?

[Steve Tinker]

I'm (nearly) in the same boat as you - car is 10 years old in April and has 48,000 miles on the water pump, so I thought I might as well change it out and hopefully will (should) have another few years of reliability.
When I contacted Flat 6 last week, they wouldn't tell me what make their water pump was, so it may well be a Laso branded item......
I'm still checking prices, so I havn't ordered one yet.

[Pinarelloman]

Steve,
Have you tried BWA down here in Sydney? I know they deal with LN & Jake and may have what you are after.
Let us know which way you go...

[Steve Tinker]

BWA won't deal with Laso as they said that they have had a number of failures in the past - they only sell genuine Porsche water pumps but @ over $500 plus gasket and shipping. Its actually cheaper to import from the states, including delivery costs !!
After saying that, if a Porsche pump fails / leaks within the warranty period, I'm assuming it will be replaced under warranty. I wonder what warranty Laso gives.....

[Frodo]

Originally Posted by Steve Tinker

I'm (nearly) in the same boat as you - car is 10 years old in April and has 48,000 miles on the water pump, so I thought I might as well change it out and hopefully will (should) have another few years of reliability.
When I contacted Flat 6 last week, they wouldn't tell me what make their water pump was, so it may well be a Laso branded item......
I'm still checking prices, so I havn't ordered one yet.

Any theories as to why Flat 6 would be so secretive about who makes their water pump??

[JTP]

Flat6 states it is an OEM pump so I'm assuming it is a genuine Porsche part and not a Lasko. But there is a part number difference with Pelican's OEM pump.

[mikefocke]

can change part numbers just because the supplier and maker of the part changes or for some trivial or important design change. Often the main portion of the part number doesn't change because the function of the part and its compatibility didn't change, just the revision number.

How many hundreds of pumps has Jake seen? Lots compared to the average Joe. And he keeps track of things and may well be on to something about one supplier that makes a difference in longevity.

We already know that the Porsche part has limited longevity in many cases.

My year old PET and Jake's part number show the same part number including the last 2 digits 53.

Also notice that Pelical doesn't rate the Laso brand as high as the Porsche one by their thumbs up rating system. May be for profit reasons, may be for quality reasons...ask Wayne.

[Jinster]

Guys, I just want to say something here. I am not taking sides, but simply trying to give this a more rationalised perspective.

I just would like to say that the Porsche warranty on the pump is unlikely to be useful if it costs 3 times as much as the Laso brand, unless Porsche is also willing to fix any engine problems caused by the pump failure for free. I mean who needs Porsche's warranty if you can just buy another Laso replacement and still come out cheaper? And we are not even touching on Laso's own warranty program yet.

Are we certain that Laso is not an OEM manufacturer? There is no reason why Porsche would stick to one factory for OEM supplies. Porsche has two car assembly plants themselves in different countries.

Jake and other repairers - no disrepect to anyone, but is it possible that they simply saw a couple of failures of a pump of a certain brand and got spooked? Who knows the details on the strength of rationales behind what caused these recommendations by workshops? And if indeed they saw many Laso branded water pumps fail, how does anyone know this is not because there are simply more Laso branded pumps out there?

If you think about this from Laso's perspective, they are a factory that has the capacity to make water pumps. They must surely supply more pumps to the auto industry than just Porsche Boxster pumps. If their pumps failed on such regularity that one is being told to avoid them, then Laso would either be out of business relatively quickly, or be improving their manufacturing skills. Are we talking about Porsche's 1% failure vs Laso's 2% failure rate here? A doubling of failures for sure, but not that significant from a single user perspective.

Anyway, just my $0.02