[Jake Raby]

Anything mechanical will wear out if the service life is long enough and any machine will break. No engine is completely bullet proof when making a decent amount of power. All this is easy for me to state and understand as I've been breaking stuff my entire life.

The M96 does have it's share of problems and the majority of these could have been avoided if the MFR had stated a more definitive set of service directives that require scheduled replacements of some high risk components.

A good example is the water pump, if the directives would have stated to change the water pump after 3 years, no matter the mileage I would have 4 cars on our property right now with failed engines. If the IMS bearing retrofit was required at 40K miles most of the cars we see with IMS failures also would avoid the issues as well.

With other cars its totally normal to change a timing belt at 60K miles and doing so is required, if not the engine will implode just like an M96 does with an IMS bearing failure. changing these timing belts can easily cost as much as an IMSR procedure. The difference is the directives tell technicians and owners that this needs to be done.

The M96 was hyped up to be much more reliable than it's aircooled predecessors which made the cars more appealing to a different group of driver. Unfortunately that group of driver's bought the car for the wrong reason in lots of instances and have treated it like a Toyota or Honda and thats what has made a big impact on the failures we see.

Drive the car like a Porsche, maintain the car like a Porsche and use your common sense to replace components before they fail and you'll have a much better experience with the M96 powered Porsche.

That said, I had a car come in on Friday for an IMSR (04 Boxster) that was to be done as a preventive measure. In our pre- IMSR evaluation we found that the engine had compression numbers 50-60 PSI low on all cylinders. We talked to the owner and he said that 10 days before the car was shipped to us that it had an episode where it smoked briefly and then started to run poorly.

With 34K on the clock and having been insanely maintained, this one is unexplained as to why it lost compression on all 6 cylinders evenly. What was going to be a quick IMSR/ Water pump/ AOS upgrade turned into another 18K expenditure. This one surprised all of us involved and it'll be interesting to see what truly took the engine out.

Its a good thing this car came to us for the IMSR as we do an extensive pre-eval that showed this issue before we spent 3,500.00 of the owner's money to upgrade an engine that was already failed, but still ran.