Lawyers don't get paid anything in class action suits unless they both win and collect. The average guy won't get anything UNLESS the lawyers sue and win. If there is no merit, nobody gets anything. The lawyers waste all their time and effort and the little guy still has nothing, which means he is no worse off than before. If the lawyers sue and win, the little guy gets "free money" with no effort whatsoever. Being a little guy, ANY compensation I get for this issue is better than what I have right now, which is NOTHING. I fail to see what could possibly be a better situation than that.

but they will get paid if there's a settlement... and settlements are usually how these things end up, unless the defendant has an airtight defense.

on my drive back home (from dallas and this time nothing broke!) i started wondering how many of these cars (IMS failures) fail on the highway and how many on closed tracks / roads. if it fails on the road and you dump oil in the middle of an interstate with cars doing 70-ish mph, i wonder what kind of safety hazard that would make.

my guess is not much, since cars would be through it before they realized it, but in the middle of a curve on the mountain, who wants to drive through a stream of oil...

this is the typical lawyer way of getting something done the long, expensive and less efficient way with a high probability of failure to boot.

A smart lawyer would come up with a way of getting Porsche to address the client's needs quickly. When history has proven that something is not the efficient way of serving your clients you do something different.

p.s.
Now more people will know that Porsches 1999 - 20009 (roughly) have a black cloud over them, one that may be in the very low single digits. And I'm pretty sure that these class action type lawyers will need to agree to keep that actual % of failures a secret as part of any cash payout to those suing Porsche. Any discovery would definitely be confidential during and after the class action suit. In other words don't even expect good and useful information for the consumer to be revealed. Only the perpetuation of unsupported guessing that hurts the value of cars owned by parties not involved in any law suits.

I know, kidnap the wives and children of Porsches's top CEO's and mail an ear to each ceo with a ransome note composed from cut out magazine letters stating "If you don't want to see any more parts of your family in the mail, then fix this one little part on the M96/97 engines."

Just because a lawyer is willing to "roll the dice" on a class action suit by fronting the costs knowing that he might win big in one out of three or four cases. There is still lots of collateral damage to the companies being litigated against. You seem to forget that the company being sued still has to pay to defend itself from the lawsuit even when there is no settlement or merit to the case, so it is far from a "no harm, no foul" situation.

Yeah, sure, but a big corporation like Porsche has a whole stable of attorneys on the payroll all the time...might as well make 'em earn their keep!

Alas, they're not litigators. For that Porsche would have to retain (and pay) outside counsel.

Ok, lets pretend that a class action is filed, everyone that bought a M96 gets $400 and Porsche declares bankruptcy. Would that make everyone feel better? What do you saber rattlers really want other than to ******************** and moan and complain?

None able to set foot in a court room and boldly carry the day for Porsche? Not one? How can you possibly know that? Even assuming what you say is true (and I make no such assumption), they've got resources, and they're in a better position than anyone to know all the relevant factual aspects of the case---not exactly a ton of research necessary on their part, they've already got the data, and what they don't know, along with the basic groundwork legal research, all their toady non-courtroom advocates can search up and prepare for their team of courtroom hired guns. Actually? They may well already have...

And even if they do have to hire a team of litigants, let 'em. Hell, they can afford it. Had they addressed the issue years ago when it first became evident there was a problem (instead of pretending there wasn't), they'd have saved everyone, including themselves, a lot of headaches (and heartache, for those individuals stuck with a ton of scrap iron that used to be a Porsche automobile). It's called a good faith effort to fix something they screwed up, and continued to screw up year after year. Lots of people out there would have much more of a warm fuzzy feeling about Porsche had they done so...and that warm fuzzy would surely translate into increased sales at the dealership. They, to one degree or another, shot themselves in the foot on this, plain and simple.

This isn't about Porsche owners "feeling better", it's about Porsche owning up to some stupid decisions that have been made on their part, their culpable refusal to acknowledge and fix a problem they've known about for years and yet, in the face of that knowledge, have continued to perpetuate and foist upon unsuspecting buyers in subsequent model releases.

Personally? I neither moan nor complain, I simply express an opinion. And I'm pretty sure I don't even have a saber to rattle---I'm not really looking for restitution from Porsche. My Box is an '01. It could be credibly argued, I suspect, that my ride was produced early enough in the game that knowledge of the IMSB defect (and its disastrous sequella, engine-wise) could not be imputed to the folks at Porsche and, if that argument is accepted, that I wouldn't have standing to collect anything from them. In any case, I bought mine second-hand, so my case is especially weak. (I have wondered, though, if a case against Porsche could be successfully founded upon a theory of an implied warranty of merchantability IF brought by the original purchaser and the machine dies an IMSB-related death prematurely. Cannot a consumer reasonably expect a well-maintained car to make it to, say, 100k miles at a minimum? I've said it before on this forum---I think there's a strong argument that that IS a reasonable expectation.)

If the German Porsche engineers thought that the IMS was a major defect they would have changed the design in a millisecond and not kept it though the transition from 986/996 to 987/997.

Why are the Europeans not all up in arms about this? They have higher expectations than us and are right there to raise hell. Nope no noise, just the Americans BMC-ing on the internet.

There are plenty of europeans complaining about IMS. But this particular forum is US centric. So it goes.

That said, I'm not clear on what Porsche buyers in the Fatherland think about the whole thing.

I also disagree re your point about the engineers. They can't just change anything they fancy. The need funding. If they're not given the money to re-engineer, it's not happening. My guess is that there will have been engineers who thought the situation was pretty rum but could do nothing about it.

If the company/brand/product is legit, they will survive.

Audi has been through this with the whole "run away accelerator" problem. They're still around and doing better than ever and more responsible might I suggest. Granted, the management who were originally in charge of the company during that fiasco may have gotten fired and new young hungry execs in their offices...but atlas that's the rules of the game.

We all love Porsche, that's why we are here, but the company needs to continue to earn that love.

No kidding. Consumer Reports, JD Power, the German Government's automotive inspectors, and a few others (I forget but I've posted their numbers before) all say the 986 / 996 have high engine reliability, and a handful of mr. crankypants on this forum know "the real truth".

How likely are you to experience an IMS failure if you're a member of this forum? 10%? 20%? Don't even start your car without having it replaced. Oh, and make sure you don't miss the sticky at the top of this forum for the "Shortlived Boxster engine survey" - with 57 thousand members, 215 of them currently online, probably a Boxster gets added ever few minutes. Er...no...not that often...there was...let me see, 1 in the past 12 months. No, someone else had one die this weekend, so that's 2 in the past 12 months. Out of FIFTY-SEVEN THOUSAND members. Yeah, 20% sounds about right.;)

My guess why Jake didn't want to join the class action? Because he knows it's a non-starter, and if it were shown in court (if it made it that far) that there was in fact no basis, then his business would dry up. Either that, or you really believe mister "Tick Tick Boom" is really, truly concerned about protecting the values of your cars.

This x 100. :cheers:

http://i47.tinypic.com/1eu5l.jpg

Everything Pothole says in this post is true, I would not be surprised to find that Porsche engineers knew it was potentially a problem before the first car shipped. Ask NASA engineers if they told the idiots to put a hold on the Challenger launch based on temperature and gasket failure, this stuff happens every day.

Well stated, I could not agree more. I am glad to see a few people here are cogent and not simply full of spite, malice or greed.

Not necessarily, the bean counters have a lot to do with these decisions, I saw plenty of "let it ride" fortune 100 behavior, in a business line with lives at risk. The game is to always raise profits if that pursuit has a nexus with doing what's best for customers it's likely serendipity. When a company does not even return written correspondence on a car dead at less than 30K they simply don't care about it and their actions echo that fact loudly.

The transition from 986 to 987 was more than a mid model upgrade. If there had been a class action worthy problem it would have been addressed ( pushed by the bean counters to reduce liability). I am perfectly aware of the propensity toward the Peter Principal in business organizations.

The lack of a lawsuit should not be the barometer of what's ethically correct. Kodak wasn't sued when their "starry night" emulsion scivings caused misdiagnosis of early breast cancers. Somewhere in this world was a breast removed because of this? You can count on it......