You'all scare me...................

[SoK]

Originally Posted by dennis

It's like anything....the more you obsess about it, the more you will find negative press to bak up your fears....like plane crashes or cancer or....I was the same way when I first bought mine ('01 Boxster) but now I just try to enjoy the hell out of it and take very good care of it.

I was the same way. I freaked out when I found this site after buying my 01. Luckily the dealer OK'd my IMS, repaired anything it needed, so now I just drive it.

My dad did get scared out of buying one though after surfing this and a couple other sites. He was going to trade his 03 350z for a 04 05 box, but opted to keep it after hearing about the IMS issue. I tried to tell him that you're really only hearing from the people that have the issue and that all the satisfied owners usually go unnoticed, just like with anything. But the damage was already done.

It seems like if you just get the PPI done, change the oil every 5k, and have the preventative maintanance done, they'll drive for a long time. So at that point, what's the difference between this and any other car?

[Jake Raby]

I've not had a single Porsche in our facility this year with over 95K miles on the clock...

Last year we only had one, it failed at 103K.

Keep in mind that we generally don't see cars that don't have issues, serious issues that can't be solved by others with confidence.

This year the failure of all failures were water pump related issues resulting in intermix and lost engines.

Luckily more and more people are scheduling preventive procedures with us to keep these things from occurring, its taken several years for people to wake up to the fact that if the preventives aren't done some failure that could have been avoided will take the engine out.

[SoK]

How many IMS updates do you do a month?

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

I've not had a single Porsche in our facility this year with over 95K miles on the clock...

Last year we only had one, it failed at 103K.

Keep in mind that we generally don't see cars that don't have issues, serious issues that can't be solved by others with confidence.

This year the failure of all failures were water pump related issues resulting in intermix and lost engines.

Luckily more and more people are scheduling preventive procedures with us to keep these things from occurring, its taken several years for people to wake up to the fact that if the preventives aren't done some failure that could have been avoided will take the engine out.

[pothole]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

I've not had a single Porsche in our facility this year with over 95K miles on the clock...

Fact: The classifieds have plenty of cars over 95k, at least the biggest classified car website here in the UK does.

136k

121k

Etc, etc, plenty more cars north of 100k.

Any suggestion such cars don't exist is clearly false. I very much doubt it's any different in the US.

Admittedly, I don't see any cars north of 150,000 miles. Whether that's because people tend not to use cars like these as daily drivers or because the cars are failing before this mileage is impossible to say.

[Jake Raby]

We have 4 IMSR procedures scheduled for December...

I never said that hundred thousand plus mile cars don't exist, I said we haven't had any in our facility this year with that many miles.. And like I said, most cars have been at our facility because they have failed- we don't do general service work or simple repairs like an INDY shop.

Like I said, finally people are seeing that issues can happen to anyone and any car and they are taking the required steps to ensure their engine is properly protected. All the cars we saw this year with intermix could have avoided that failure with a simple water pump replacement..

We see more failed engines than anyone in the US, because the failure prevention and repair is our primary focus along with engine development.. I expect tomorrow to be a busy day on the phones, any "failure Monday" is busy but after a 4 day weekend we might set another record!

[pothole]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

I never said that hundred thousand plus mile cars don't exist, I said we haven't had any in our facility this year with that many miles..

Fair enough. What exactly was your point, then, in highlighting that you haven't seen any cars above 95k this year and only one last year? On the face of it, the clear inference is that such cars are at the very least quite rare.

[Jake Raby]

The point was all the failures we've seen this year have occurred with vehicles less than 100K miles.

Many more people use the M96 powered Porsches for daily driving than ealier Porsche models.. Thats because they have creature comforts that the older cars simply didn't have..

Good A/C, real heat, power brakes and power steering are not things my first few generations of Porsches had.. Due to that those cars were 2nd, 3rd of 4th vehicles where many Boxsters are primary vehicles...

[pothole]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

The point was all the failures we've seen this year have occurred with vehicles less than 100K miles.

OK, and what do you learn from that?

[fatmike]

Originally Posted by pothole

people tend not to use cars like these as daily drivers.

Precisely. So as a group they tend to have lower mileage.



Add to the fact that we are dealing with a group of cars that can be (in the case of the '97) up to 14 years old. In general how reliable is any 14 year old car??? I strongly suspect the Boxster is better than average.


Need to keep some perspective sometimes. My 1999 BMW is long gone...





/

[Brucelee]

Originally Posted by pothole

Fact: The classifieds have plenty of cars over 95k, at least the biggest classified car website here in the UK does.

136k

121k

Etc, etc, plenty more cars north of 100k.

Any suggestion such cars don't exist is clearly false. I very much doubt it's any different in the US.

Admittedly, I don't see any cars north of 150,000 miles. Whether that's because people tend not to use cars like these as daily drivers or because the cars are failing before this mileage is impossible to say.

You have no way of knowing how many of those cars have had engine trouble in the past.

[pothole]

Originally Posted by Brucelee

You have no way of knowing how many of those cars have had engine trouble in the past.

That is very true. However, without any specific information they could just as easily be on the original engine as not.

Moreover, with high mile cars, advertisers usually go out of their way to highlight if the engine has been replaced and is carry significantly fewer miles than the chassis. Ya know, odo shows 130,000 but new engine fitted 40,000 miles ago. This is common in the UK at least. None of the ads I looked at mentions replacement engines.

I suspect if any of cars had engine replacements it would have been a good while ago as these cars have long since ceased to be economical to repair should the worse happen.

The other point to note about the anecdotal observation that nearly all engines failures happen at relatively low miles is that you might also conclude that the higher mile engines are the proven good ones. So if you do see one with 100k up on the original lump, you know it's a goodun'.

Frankly, I don't know if that's true. I just don't really follow Mr Raby's contribution in this thread. His comment seems to be a clear attempt to infer that these lumps don't seem to last beyond 100k, but he seems unwilling to come out and say that. If that's not what he is inferring, then I'm not sure what we are supposed to learn from his comment.

Personally, I think these engines probably are prone to many, many more failures than an equivalent, say, BMW six-cylinder engine. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's terribly likely you'll experience the worst yourself. Exactly what the chances of actual failure are in a well maintained engine I think is super hard to judge. If you read enough of these threads you might come away with the impression that it's 50/50. I doubt it's as bad as that. But I guess we will never know.