Tiptronic issues, Blinking red light while in Drive

[99BoxsterATL]

My '99 blinks while in Drive, if I take the stick to put in Manual mode, it will not switch over to Manual and the red continues to blink in red. If I either speed up very fast to maybe 60-70 it will not blink and move to manual mode when I switch it, or I have to take the shifter and go left/right/left/ right continuously until finally the light stos blinking and it works normally. It's almost as if the transmission is confused and will drive in an automatic mode until it figures itself out and allows to to drive Manual. Maybe the sensor is not sending which mode it is in auto or manual. It will let me drive though while blinking for however long I want to. If I ever get it to stop blinking and then eventually stop somewhere and put it in park, going back to Drive or Manual, makes the transmission confused again... What do I do???? Anyone have this problem before and how much to fix??? Please help! Thanks!

[99BoxsterATL]

Well, not that any responded but I thought I would tell what was wrong with my car in case anyone else has a problem in the future.

Brought it to Porsche and this is what they found out:

Blinking light in "drive" and not having "manual" lights work when in "manual" mode= Transmission cable did not have enough slack in it and had to be tightened from when previous owner did an engine swap. Cost of tightening a cable= $105. Finding out my car I just purchased has a new engine= $Priceless

Horn blowing fuse and not working= Needed to replace metal bracket with rubber bushings that push the horn mechanism back into "before pushing horn" state. = $200.

So... $300 bucks spent in an hour and a half. Am I happy I brought it to Porsche? well if they didn't tell me I had a new engine then no I wouldn't have been happy. Finding out I had a new engine made it worth every penny because I was going to sell the car after I heard about all the problems '99 had. So I got my pet peeves taken care of, got some good news, and was able to sip on a cold water bottle that had the label replaced with a Porsche label and all that fancied my day.

[Ronzi]

Sorry nobody responded to your original post. They were probably as puzzled as I was, never having heard of the blinking shifter light phenomenon. It sounds logical that the shifter cable mal-adjustment was the culprit.
Congrats on the new motor. Did the dealer give you any indication as to why the engine was replaced? Tipper cars are typically if not immune then at least not as susceptible to the RMS problem.
Thanks for posting the solution to the blinking problem.

[jci-joe]

I have had my 99 boxster for about 2 months and this issue came up for me as well. While I have put about 800 miles on the car, this has only happened twice. If I shut the car off and turned it back on, it went away. I was going back and forth between the manual and auto mode and I think it got confused.

[MNBoxster]

Hi,

Actually, this phenomena is not all that rare. A misadjusted cable can be one culprit as can a dirty, gummed up switch mechanism. I had this happen to mine shortly after purchasing it. The Dealer removed and cleaned the switch and adjusted the cable. 2 years and many thousands of miles later, the issue has not reoccurred...

Happy Motoring!... Jim'99