High mileage car engine failures?

[The Radium King]

Originally Posted by 78F350

Reading through recent threads made me wonder...
I really don't often hear of Boxsters with 150,000+ miles having catastrophic engine failures. It's the '00 - '04 with low miles that seem to post about it most often. Maybe because it's expected in a higher mile engine.
With the advice I've seen about buying the newest, lowest mile 986 (still 12+ year old) I wonder if one with 150,000 miles that has seen good care and replacement of wear items is actually a better car than a garage queen with 50,000 and all original parts.
From what I see, these engines do best when driven and driving adds up the miles.
Does anyone want to post actual experience one way or the other?

dunno about experience, but i was thinking the same thing recently. it used to be that the internet wisdom was that, if the ims was going to fail, it would happen early in the engine life and if it made it to 100k miles then you were out of harms way.

recently, however, i've seen a few people ask about high mileage cars and the same purveyors of internet wisdom are saying that at 150k miles the engine is done; throw it out and get a new one.

so it seems we can't win in this here internet. either that or for some reason we love driving the resale value of our cars down.

[Luv2Box]

Keep in mind that the class action law suit against Porsche for faulty IMS bearings only included the model years of 2000-2005 which is the years the most catastrophic failures occurred. Many blame it on the switch from a double row IMS, used in the 97-99 model years to the single row IMS used in the 2000-2005 models. The number of Boxsters involved was around 54K and some years had a failure rate as high as 10%. Mileage did not seem to be an issue as the failure rate covered low and high mileage vehicles. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a consistent reason to back up claims that most failures occur in garage queen cars. It appears to be the luck of the draw.

[itsnotanova]

I have a 99 with 175k that sounds better than the 99 with 65k. The 175k motor was the dirtiest motor I've ever had though. That thing was covered in thick greasy goo.

[jdlmodelt]

Originally Posted by The Radium King

dunno about experience, but i was thinking the same thing recently. it used to be that the internet wisdom was that, if the ims was going to fail, it would happen early in the engine life and if it made it to 100k miles then you were out of harms way.

recently, however, i've seen a few people ask about high mileage cars and the same purveyors of internet wisdom are saying that at 150k miles the engine is done; throw it out and get a new one.

so it seems we can't win in this here internet. either that or for some reason we love driving the resale value of our cars down.

I think 150k is a relative term. Depends on a LOT of factors.