IMS class action suit

[landrovered]

So this is an ethical question?

Bullcrap this is a bunch of folks who want Porsche to repair their cars for free or near free even thought they are the third owner or even purchased the car with a blown IMS. People that were first owners and were good dealership customers did get relief in some cases mostly as a good will gesture on the part of the dealers.

Porsche at its worst is 10 times more professional and ethical than most other car manufacturers. If you don't believe me, buy a Land Rover and experience their bedside manner.

[Ghostrider 310]

Originally Posted by landrovered

So this is an ethical question?

Bullcrap this is a bunch of folks who want Porsche to repair their cars for free or near free even thought they are the third owner or even purchased the car with a blown IMS. People that were first owners and were good dealership customers did get relief in some cases mostly as a good will gesture on the part of the dealers.

Porsche at its worst is 10 times more professional and ethical than most other car manufacturers. If you don't believe me, buy a Land Rover and experience their bedside manner.

Well you know what opinions are like and everyone has one. Porsche cars are typically babied, no winters, chronic crackhead like oil changes far before the intervals. People going through oil filters like their own feces looking for a disease. The cars are dawdled on and should last at least 100K, that's just my opinion which stinks like everyone else's. If Seinfeld blows a motor I'm sure it's tended too, for the rest the joke is on them, especially on decade old cars the company would rather forget.

PS Nobody said fix it free but a blatant no reply is the "bull" not the customers seeking council on motors blown under 30K or more laughable, replacement motors blowing up, PA thetic.

[dewolf]

Originally Posted by landrovered

If the German Porsche engineers thought that the IMS was a major defect they would have changed the design in a millisecond and not kept it though the transition from 986/996 to 987/997.

If this was a known failure after the manufacture of the engine and it did fail during r&d testing then these failures would have been calculated into the production costs. A cetain failure rate is expected by all manufacturers of most products. How they deal with said failures ia a different matter entirley.

[landrovered]

There are too many manufacturers to name that have gone to timing belts, a broken timing belt will cause extensive damage to an engine. Many break before their normal service life is reached but I don't see folks lining up to sue them.

[truegearhead]

Is anyone familiar with the BMW e46 rear floor failure class action suit? By the way if you think an IMS failure is bad wait until you read this! This situation seems very similiar to Porsches with the exception that very few cars fail

E46 News: BMW Sub-frame Defect Class Action Lawsuit - Settlement Approved - Updated information - E46Fanatics

[Frodo]

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!]

[pothole]

Originally Posted by truegearhead

Is anyone familiar with the BMW e46 rear floor failure class action suit? By the way if you think an IMS failure is bad wait until you read this! This situation seems very similiar to Porsches with the exception that very few cars fail

E46 News: BMW Sub-frame Defect Class Action Lawsuit - Settlement Approved - Updated information - E46Fanatics

I'm familiar with the subframe issue and it's not even close to being as bad as the IMS issue. I'm not talking about frequency, I'm talking about consequences for owners.

IMSB failure can generate bills of $10k, $20k etc. I tore the subframe on my BMW and had it repaired for about $700. Sure, for some people the bill was bigger. But nothing like the cost of installing a crate engine from Porsche. Not. Even. Close.

I'm surprised at the attitude of some in this thread. In my view, addressing the IMSB problem earlier would not have been financially odious for Porsche. They have now solved most of the problems, it seems.

That the company failed to solve the problem for so long (as well as all the other major issues) shows scant regard for customers or the company's heritage. I don't actually think any of this will hurt the company, even if a class action suit suceeds. I just think it's a real shame that there's a whole decade's worth of Porsche sportscars out there with uneccessarily crummy engines.

[Frodo]

^^^ I could not agree more!

[CenterIsl]

Originally Posted by pothole

In my view, addressing the IMSB problem earlier would not have been financially odious for Porsche

Well, that's the problem - you don't own and run Porsche. The people who do - and they are the only ones who truly know the actual failure rates - apparently decided that a change to the IMSB was not a priority.

Originally Posted by pothole

...shows scant regard for customers or the company's heritage...

Customers? Are you saying that the folks who have had IMSB failures (all engine failures are assumed to be IMSB - I think it was Jake who said he'd identified more than 20 "modes of failure", and on this factor I tend to believe him) bought their cars from Porsche? If you're the 2nd, 3rd or 10th owner I'm sorry, you are not a Porsche car "customer" (you might be an indirect parts customer). As for the company's "heritage", I think the ultimate impact of the IMSB "issue" is very uncertain. The "heritage" argument, of course, has been used by many actual car customers to say that even producing the Boxster has devalued the brand and dis-respected the "heritage". Same with producing water-cooled engines. And SUVs. And mass production. And automatic transmissions. And air-conditioning. And multi-speaker stereos (which have been uniformly awful!) . And electronic steering. There's been so much "heritage" reduction going on, the brand must surely be held in very low esteem by now.

[Ghostrider 310]

You might have a more salient argument if Porsche took care of all the original purchasers. It's also worthwhile to note the cars were not Escorts priced at about 15K, in fact the engine replacement is more than a new escort complete. You can make a case for it being why Saab is out of business but every little thing that crapped on my dad's three Saab cars was replaced free, a radiator after 30,000..

[NoGaBiker]

Originally Posted by Frodo

None able to set foot in a court room and boldly carry the day for Porsche? Not one? How can you possibly know that? Even assuming what you say is true (and I make no such assumption), they've got resources, and they're in a better position than anyone to know all the relevant factual aspects of the case---not exactly a ton of research necessary on their part, they've already got the data, and what they don't know, along with the basic groundwork legal research, all their toady non-courtroom advocates can search up and prepare for their team of courtroom hired guns. Actually? They may well already have...

And even if they do have to hire a team of litigants, let 'em. Hell, they can afford it. Had they addressed the issue years ago when it first became evident there was a problem (instead of pretending there wasn't), they'd have saved everyone, including themselves, a lot of headaches (and heartache, for those individuals stuck with a ton of scrap iron that used to be a Porsche automobile). It's called a good faith effort to fix something they screwed up, and continued to screw up year after year. Lots of people out there would have much more of a warm fuzzy feeling about Porsche had they done so...and that warm fuzzy would surely translate into increased sales at the dealership. They, to one degree or another, shot themselves in the foot on this, plain and simple.

No offense or anything, I'm sure you're a very smart person, but this is clearly not your field of expertise. Probably best to quit while you're... only this far behind.

[Frodo]

Originally Posted by NoGaBiker

No offense or anything, I'm sure you're a very smart person, but this is clearly not your field of expertise. Probably best to quit while you're... only this far behind.

Uhh, Excuse Me?? What makes you the expert here? I what I need to know about these cars, and also more than a bit about the legal profession, believe you me...

But for the "", offense would have been taken!

[NoGaBiker]

Originally Posted by Frodo

I what I need to know about these cars

Man, you're just digging it deeper. Is that supposed to make sense?

As to your knowledge of the practices of the legal profession... okay. I stand corrected. Your suggestion that a corporation would litigate a major class action lawsuit (and believe me, they're all major) by using corporate counsel instead of retaining outside litigators sounded like someone who didn't know what they were talking about with respect to commercial litigation.

Wait... it still does!

[CenterIsl]

Originally Posted by Ghostrider 310

You might have a more salient argument if Porsche took care of all the original purchasers.

They didn't? I dunno, it's been a while since someone like that has popped up, but my vague recollection is that if you were 1) the original owner, and 2) dealer maintained, that even if you were out of warranty (by maybe a year or two) that they might offset some / most of the cost.

But if you honestly feel that Porsche should furnish a new engine to a 3rd (or more) owner of a vehicle that is anywhere from a couple to a dozen years out of warranty, when any of those owners might have "upgraded" their oil to their synthetic of choice (in retrospect, all those oil threads have disappeared - maybe that's one of the good things about the IMSB issue - people have stopped trying to "innovate" the lubrication), bolted on the latest shiny intake / exhaust, chipped the car for better performance (because Porsche doesn't understand how to make their engines perform), and flogged the car mercilously (nobody confesse to overrevs but somehow the OBD magically shows this, must be another conspiracy), then I think it's fair to say that you will be disappointed.

FWIW, my Lexus dealer has performed out-of-warranty fixes on my GX470 free or at a significantly reduced rate, and each time they've requested that I not share the details on a public forum. So I can easily imagine that if Porsche NA and/or the local Porsche dealer did something above and beyond their warranty obligation, we might never hear about it.

[Mark_T]

Originally Posted by NoGaBiker

Man, you're just digging it deeper. Is that supposed to make sense?

As to your knowledge of the practices of the legal profession... okay. I stand corrected. Your suggestion that a corporation would litigate a major class action lawsuit (and believe me, they're all major) by using corporate counsel instead of retaining outside litigators sounded like someone who didn't know what they were talking about with respect to commercial litigation.

Wait... it still does!

This is a good debate and everyone should feel welcome to express their opinion on the topic, including you and including Frodo. There is no need to be an ass and make personal attacks.

[NoGaBiker]

I was peripherally connected to the GM Exploding Side Saddle Gas Tank litigation 15 years ago or so. People were getting blown up or burned alive in their GMC pickups because of a faulty design that more than one GM engineer had warned about in writing. Unfortunately, management ran the numbers and decided that a recall of however many million trucks were affected would be much more expensive than the cumulative cost of the litigation of the small number of people who would be burned to death in the trucks.

I say all this to say that juries are very impressed by such revelations, and tend to reward plaintiffs rather handsomely (to the tune of 9 figures in the Shannon Mosely case, including $101M in punatives!) But when a bunch of "rich" guys get stuck having to buy engines for their out-of-warranty Porsches, that's a lot tougher sell. Bank on it: a class-action or an individual lawsuit against PAG is a non-starter.

[Ghostrider 310]

No lawyer here, just saying that when Kodak was sued they used the council they kept on their own staff to dissuade further action and mute the complainers. As for the engines I'm quite sure when a 986 is sitting on a DEALER lot they don't make any mention that a thousand miles from now if it explodes you is on " yur own", seems like that might thwart sales. I'll go to the grave saying they owed everyone at the very least a communication in response to the problem being reported.

[landrovered]

If you want Porsche support on a used car the purchase a Certified Pre Owned car with an extended warranty. If you bought from a private individual and opted not to purchase an aftermarket warranty ( there are many and they cover oiled parts) then you have made the choice to roll the dice on future repairs, how does that savings jingle in your pocket now?

[Ghostrider 310]

Originally Posted by landrovered

If you want Porsche support on a used car the purchase a Certified Pre Owned car with an extended warranty. If you bought from a private individual and opted not to purchase an aftermarket warranty ( there are many and they cover oiled parts) then you have made the choice to roll the dice on future repairs, how does that savings jingle in your pocket now?

Extended warranties are for chumps, in the long run you do better without them. Again I refer you to the dealer scenario, if the dealer says "I'd get the extended warranty" then a wise buyer should check the ol google, eff the car fax. I have no plans on extending the factory warranty, either it makes it or it doesn't the coin I'm jangling is the warranty cost I squirreled away for repairs.

[NoGaBiker]

Originally Posted by Ghostrider 310

No lawyer here, just saying that when Kodak was sued they used the council they kept on their own staff to dissuade further action and mute the complainers.

Not sure what you're talking about (Kodak is probably sued weekly, or were when they were a relevant company), but what I'm pretty sure they didn't do is go into a courtroom and try to represent themselves in class-action litigation. It's kinda like asking the service writer (who knows a lot about Porsches and is very familiar with what the parts are and has maybe helped a tech do an oil change, and is excellent at managing the work of the techs) to perform a G50 transmission rebuild on an 88 Carrera 3.2 with his own two hands.