Purchase or Not-- 2001 Boxster S--White Smoke Cloud
 

I'm deciding whether or not to purchase this vehicle. It sill be my first Boxster. There is smoke coming from the exhaust at idle and acceleration. I'm hoping it's the AOS. Is this a common condition to "steal" a Boxster? I can send videos if anyone wants a better look. Please help. Thank you

The engine also makes a whistle/thump sound at idle

What color is the smoke? How does it smell? How cheap is stealing it? You really want your first Boxster to run well unless you are a good mechanic or have a best friend as one.

The smoke is light white on idle and then thick white on acceleration. I'll pay attention to the smell next time I look at it. I'm getting it for a $3000 or less and with 130k miles. I'm looking at it as a project so I'm just hoping it will run well enough if the smoke is due to something easily fixable.

Look at the coolant level. Rotten egg smell? How close is a true Porsche mechanic? If it cost $3k could you afford the repair?

Take the oil fill off
Put you hand on it, if there is a reasonable suction, AOS is likely.

If it’s coolant, cracked heads or cracked cylinder liners are usually the culprit
Head gaskets almost never fail.
Sometimes the oil cooler which is really a oil to coolant heat exchanger sometimes does.

If your considering buying a car with possible issues you need to do some diagnostics.
simple things like pulling the spark plugs and reading them.
They will tell you if the smoke is an oil issue or a coolant issue.
A compression test will tell you general over all condition of valves and rings and other engine internals.
A leak down test is that will tell you the general condition of the valves and rings.
A vacuum test of the engine and also a vacuum test at the oil fill cap.
A visual inspection of the engine bay.
If you have any oily residue you have oil leaks and vacuum leaks.
There are a number of simple test you can do to asses overall condition.

If your not familiar with general diagnostics of an automobile then find a shop or person who is. Even if you spend a few hundred dollars to have the car looked at it could safe you thousands.

Walk away from it. There are plenty of cars out there without clearly obvious problems.

I too recently bought a cheap 01 986 for about 4900$ in Los Angeles. I’m a pretty confident mechanical enthusiast & was fairly prepared for something that wasn’t going to be easy. Turns out I had to replace the variocam pads which involves pulling the valve covers and removing the cams. Was a doable job but was tough, took a lot of time and patience, and excellent instructions from [mention]TTGator [/mention] .

I would say this. A cheap porsche is only a deal if you have the desire to get your hands dirty and spend long hours diagnosing problems.

If you’re looking for a daily driver porsche that you only want to do basic work on (plugs, oil, cosmetics) then I would probably look in the 6K to 7K range and finding a car that was well taken care of.

The 3-5K range in CA is mostly cars that have been abused and need lots of love.


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Yes, definitely be careful. But I wouldn't say to walk away without knowing more diagnosis of the problem at least. However, these cars are not at all like other cars, even other, older Porsches. They are fragile, troublesome, irritating, difficult and more than anything, they just love to have one of their 30 known issues catastrophically destroy the engine for no good reason at all. However, that being said I think for $3000 you wouldn't lose ay money as long as you are able to part it out if things go bad.

If it needs engine out service, factor around $3000 for parts if you're doing all the work yourself. You might get out with less than that but you also might need more to fix a major issue. If it's just an AOS, that's not too expensive but I've heard those are a pain to do with the engine still in the car.

The good news: It's fairly easy to the the engine out compared to other modern cars. First time is always fun, of course, especially since it's mid engined which makes much of the effort a new experience if you're used to front engined cars like most of us. And there is lots of info about most of the known 30 issues online. (And if you think I'm exaggerating about 30 catastrophic engine issues, I'm not; there are literally 30 according to experts in these cars.)

I bought a cheap Boxster S in LA over a year ago. Mine had a transmission issue and then an unexplained oil leak from one of the heads. To make a long story short, I took it apart and then spent a year buying $2-3000 in parts and still need more. That's just to replace a head gasket that had been installed with a speck of funk on the sealing lip! Of course, many of the parts fall under the "while I'm in there" mantra. But I haven't really addressed the tranny problem yet so that might be another $2-4000 to sort out.

Of course, I'm still glad I bought it as it is/was so much fun to drive and hopefully I'll have it going again someday soon! But be careful and aware of what you might be in for. You will absolutely need the ability to work on it yourself and a place to do it. I know that can be tough in certain locations like LA. If you don't have those two aspects, then you will need gobs of money, and I mean a lot. Not much is cheap on these cars. And I've owned 944's for over 30 years but the prices on some 986 parts shock me, including aftermarket supplier prices!

Awareness on these cars is good although I'm sort of glad I lacked some of it when I bought mine as I may never have bought one....And that contradiction about sums up these cars.

Use the suggestions in this thread from others and make sure it's the AOS. And of course, buy the genuine Porsche part which is at least $100 IIRC. I would buy from FCP euro as at least you will never have to pay for the same part again thanks to their lifetime replacement arrangement. And nothing you replace on a Boxster will last for the life of the car; everything on a Boxster will need it again at some point.

Good luck on your purchase.