IMS class action suit
 

While searching around the Pelican site, I found this ad link

Porsche IMS Failure : NEW JERSEY CLASS ACTION ATTORNEY | NJ MASS TORT LAWYER

Looks like a firm is looking for potential clients and evidence to support a class action suit against Porsche for the IMS failures.

In my experience, the ONLY people who win in a class action suit are the lawyers who organize the class action suit.

They are basically a pyramid scheme.

Hrmm interesting. As much as I am a Porsche aficionado, I would have to say Porsche pulled a scumbag move in regards to addressing the m96 IMS issues. It's a shame it's escalated to this point. I am interested to see how this goes. Sadly, LAP1DOUG, you are probably right about the lawyers being the only winners in the suit. It would be far more conducive to have your say in a small claims court as a victim of flawed design and negligence on behalf of Porsche.

I don't understand how you can say that the only people who win in a class action suit are the lawyers who organize it. Let's say that a class action is started against Porsche for IMSB defective design and it is successful and everyone who ever purchased a car with the defective design is given a free oil change at a dealership (value $200), whether you experienced engine failure or not. Those who had a failure may be awarded more. At that point, if you didn't have a failure, you have a free oil change and it didn't cost you anything. No one asked you to contribute to the costs of the suit or participate in any way. You didn't have to go to court or hire an expert witness. All you had to do was maybe fill out a form and mail it back. Who cares how much money the lawyers make? What if Porsche doesn't settle and the case has to go to trial? You don't pay anything. If the class action fails, which is much more likely than for it to succeed, the lawyers who started the class action get nothing and are out all of their costs, expenses and time. Again, you don't pay anything. As I see it, since Porsche has offered NOTHING to M96 engine owners, anything you get from a class action suit is a bonus. If Porsche were covering even a part of the cost of engine upgrades or repairs, there would be no need for a class action suit and I might think differently about it. As far as small claims court is concerned, it is a good idea if your claim is for failure to repair something under warranty or other circumstances where expert testimony is not required. In the case of the IMSB, you can't prove defective design without expert testimony and unless you are Jake you will have to hire an expert at significant cost, if you can find one, to testify. This often makes it cost prohibitive for an individual to prosecute a case for a single car. The prospective award is often outweighed by the cost involved. Just my two cents.

Would'nt Porsche be insured against this? You can bet that if a class action suit proceeds, Porsche will bring in their liabilty insurers as a third party. It really could be a win if Porsche and the insurers share the cost of a succesful suit.

Small claims court will ONLY AWARD A MAXIMUM of $5,000 in most states. That would not begin to cover some people's actual loss. Porsche should stand up and do what is right. It is a shame you have to force them to do it with an attorney because, everyone loses with an attorney! Your BEST DAY in COURT IS STILL THE WORST DAY OF YOUR LIFE - WIN or LOSE. Bummer when you have to resort to that low level.

I fail to see how any legal action whether it be small claims court or class action suit could be successful against Porsche. Once your Porsche is out of warranty you are not covered. If you buy an unwarranted Porsche, it is caveat emptor/buyer beware just like any other car. I am not a lawyer, just a layperson and I would think any legal action would be unsuccessful and then you would be in the hole for the legal costs. Any person who does not do their research on a car before they buy it is negligent. I feel sorry for anybody that has IMS failure and subsequent engine failure but being forewarned = $$$ saved. Get an IMS Guardian and/or get a new IMS installed.You cannot run a Boxster as cheaply as a Miata but then the Boxster is a lot more car.I would be interested how many of you out there knew about IMS failure before you bought your Boxster?

IMO, Linklaw is correct (obviously a Grisham fan)

Homeboy is also right but needs to add that a victory in small claims court only gets you an acknowledgement of liability (a judgement). You're still on your own to actually collect on that judgement through a garnishing order if the compant doesn't willingly pay. I don't know about the states, but here the upper limit on small claims action was raised a few years back. It's now either $10k or $20k - I don't remember.

Recycled - you're wrong. For example, people have won suits against firearms manufacturers years after warranty expired, and for issues arising from their own stupidity and no fault of the gun at all. Hence the warning stamped on the barrel of Ruger firearms. I've never understood the American legal system where companies can be successfully sued for not anticipating just how fkn stupid their customers are.

Am I wrong in assuming you would actually have to have suffered damages (e.g. bearing failure) to be entitled to anything? I find it hard be believe a 2nd or 3rd owner without any actual damages would be entitled to a thing, even if they took preventative measures.

Im worried what a class action, if media gets hold of it, will do to the already sinking values of our cars!

The values of these cars will decrease no matter what to the point where ims preventive or post failure repairs on them will one day exceed their sales value. So as someone said in another post: if you like the boxster and already aware of the ims issue, you still will buy it and if their value drops then you can be able to maintain them for thousands cheaper so win win.

A 1999 Boxster with 100,000 miles has already dropped to ~$8,500 on KBB and every model year thereafter is on the same downward slope. There is almost no intrinsic Porsche brand value that is retained in a 986 Boxster - its a used car and not much more. Of course, well cared and well optioned cars will always be worth slightly more.

If you love the car like I do, then I could care less about re-sale value becauase its all about DRIVING value! :D

Yep Porsche maybe shoulda come up with a better design. Maybe they shoulda figured out the problem sooner and developed a retrofit. Maybe these cars wouldn't be so damn fun to drive. Stuff happens and I can't be bothered. I think a class action suit has a snowballs chance in hell of returning anything to actual car owners. I'll pass thanks. :)

Sounds so pragmatic... in theory. Too bad it wouldn't resemble a damn thing like that once trial lawyers sink their teeth into it. Free oil change? Ha! Owners would be lucky to end up with a free crush washer for the oil drain plug... after providing proof they've paid for six previous oil changes in same vehicle...within x time frame... etc. etc. etc.

Porsche should have valued their loyal customers more than they did, even 911 cars with higher window stickers went ignored much to the disappointment of their owners. Seems an exchange program or a discounted replacement at substantially reduced cost would have been honorable, after all even at 8K they are not upside down on a rebuild replacement engine only option. I hope all you guys keep your 986 cars running a good long time, when it comes to these cars knowledge is power for sure.

A class action suit is the result of two lawyers with the same gripe who talk about it at a cocktail party. Once class status is awarded then the plaintiffs are simply invisible tools for lawyer spite.

I got a check in the mail from a suit I did not know I was part of. The lawyers got $0.56 and I got the remainder of the settlement which was $0.13. Don't even try to tell me that class action suits benefit ANYONE but the lawyers.

Shakespeare was right!

right, but they will hold SOME value.....a S should at least hold value simlilar to a 951 in the long term, but Im afraid if a class action suit goes through and more people besides internet forums find out about a possible issue then the cars will be worth less than 924's

The other part to law suits is that it sends Porsche the message that they need to stand by their products. A fix to the IMS problem is not rolling out the 981 LOL

Other brands BMW, AUDI all have extended warranty programs that cover certain known issues for 10 years or 100k, regardless if its first owner or not. The only way that warranty is nullified is if the car has been tuned and the drive train messed with.

An extended warranty is not a recall. Its a come in and we'll fix it if there is a problem. If Porsche feels that the IMS is a non-issue...a fluke problem if you will, then they should feel safe in lending out this warranty because the odds are they might not see one valid IMS issue claim...which we the community know is not true but that's how they are treating it as...right?

I really don't believe the IMS issue is as big as the internet forums and a few folks who are profiting from the hype are making it.

Talk of suing Porsche is cheap and easy for disgruntled owners. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Hell, one guy on this board premeditatedly purchased a car with a blown IMS and then wanted to solicit the help of people here to force Porsche dealers to pay for the repair.

The point is that this forum is just like the "rent a mob" in Bonfire of the Vanities. Six people standing behind the reporter with signs. It is an echo chamber and is not representative of the real world.

Bring in lawyers and a class action, their version of trying to "shoot the moon" in Hearts, and what you get is a big ugly mess that only serves to enrich the lawyers and does nothing for the average guy because he does not know and does not care.

If you refer to Shakespeare's quote from Henry VI: "THE FIRST THING WE DO, LET'S KILL ALL THE LAWYERS," you don't understand the quote. The quote was from Dick the Butcher, "the head of an army of rabble and a demagogue pandering to the ignorant," who sought to overthrow the government. If that's the best criticism of lawyers you can find, that's pretty darned pathetic. Even your example is kind of stupid. Okay, so you only got 13 cents. The lawyer at least worked for his 56 cents. You didn't. Personally I'll take all the free money I can get without whining about it.

I recently got a check for $80 from a lawyer who sued in a class action suit against the local Toyota dealer for false advertising for adding in a $400 document preparation fee to the advertised price. I bought the car two years ago and sucked it up. I figured it was a done deal. The lawyer probably got a big fee -- well, good for him! I'm glad they sued, and I got $80 back that I otherwise would have never received. It also taught these SOBs a lesson. Now, tell me again how bad the lawyers are?

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......