Maintanance costs for a Boxter 986?

[Perfectlap]

Originally Posted by profchaos911

What it sounds like is you guys are saying that any used car will cost about $2k a year in maintenance cost, did I get that right?

Any used German sports car. Sports car parts from Germany are fragile/lightweight.
Some are reliable, some are not but very few are durable.
On the other hand I don't think a VW Jetta would cost you $2k to maintain. But that's not a sports car.
Generally speaking, German Sports cars are engineered to drive at a high level of maintenance. If you don't maintain that level they drive like crap, if at all.

You have to look at this way. Any Porsche you buy costs at least $20K. You can buy it for $7K but if you intend to really rack up miles, you'll be paying for the other $13k one way or another. If you only take the car out once a week for a short drive maybe you can get away with not putting money into it. But that just destroys the engine as moisture turns the oil acidic and the build up creates oxidation. It has to run long enough to get real hot and burn off all that stuff.

[Myoung73]

Many good and informative posts here already. I will add my 2 cents. I also looked through the wealth of great information mainly on this site when I started looking for a 986. It almost scared me away from the 986 mainly due to the IMSB issues. I pretty much knew I would get the imsb done in whatever car I bought if I wasn't sure it had been done or had been done a while / many miles ago. This one had the IMSB done but almost 4 years ago and LN recommends replacing every 4 years or 50k miles. Ultimately I found a very good condition 2003 S with 76k miles on it. It was in much better shape than many others I had looked at. But the ppi indicated it needed new rotors and pads all around. I talked the guy down to 12k from $14k. Thought that was a pretty good price based on other S sales in my area. Only thing that absolutely needed to be done was brakes for about 1,700. But I also did clutch (was getting a bit low but could have lasted a bit longer), IMSB (dof), Aos, ignition coils (ppi indicated they were cracked and quite worn but they still worked), rms, and some other smaller stuff. Ultimately cost me over 5k. I did the work for the reasons stated above, didn't want some things now to become big problems later. Especially didn't want a tanked engine due to imsb. Lot of extra cash? Yes. Do I regret it? No. If the pull of driving / owning a Porsche and having the fun you can have in these cars is strong enough (and budget allows) then go for it. If not, like others have said, look elsewhere.