ORIGINAL: Steve Brookes
Many thanks for your comments Chris. Also for your earlier point about a tip option. My first boxster which I had for over 6 years was a tip and a great commuting car and still fun to drive. So I'm certainly not an anti-tipper (is that a new phrase [
]) but at the same time, something is telling me that the 968 would have to be a manual.
Was the Boxster tip buttons on the steering wheel or paddles? I've not driven either, but one aspect of the 968 tip that I really like is that, in manual mode, you still change gear with the gear stick. To the right of the main "gate" is a small gate, you bring the stick from D into this smaller gate, then press forward to change up, backward to change down - so it's sort of like a manual, but without the added hassle of a clutch! As I said earlier, I was quite dubious when I first test drove the tip coupe in late 1998, but within a month of buying the car, I loved the tip gearchange and would not now go back to a manual. Also handy when herself uses the car - the coupe was, for its first 2 years, our main car, so she drove it quite a lot - but in D!
Another point for the tip is that you only have 4 gears rather than 6. She only goes down the box to 2nd, but that gear is fine for pulling away briskly - and even in manual, if you floor it pulling away it will kick down to 1, or you can manually select 1. 2nd is quite long - doesn't red line until about 75-80mph, and 3rd goes over the ton (naughty but nice!). The box is also quite clever - in auto mode it has (IIRC) 5 modes, and chooses the right one for the way you are driving. In manual mode, you cannot over-rev - red line it without touching the stick and it will change up for you - nor can you go below about 1200RPM without it changing down for you, so you can't pull up to a roundabout in 4th and bog down when you try to pull away (as happened to me test driving a BMW M3 steptronic in 1998 - frightening!!).
The one weakness of the gearchange that I know of is the little microswitch that tells the box you want manual mode. It has a small cranked operating arm with a roller on the end, the operating arm can break - and getting a replacement is a mission. OK, a replacement can be "southern engineered" - it was done to my coupe for a while, and there's a thread on 968uk where another member did the same - but i had to contact the original manufacturer to get a pukka replacement, and he only had a few left.
Another little point - if the car you buy still has the standard ECU chip, get a Promax 7100 chip from Stu (Mr968 on here) on K300/porsche968uk - it improves the mid range by smoothing out the variocam influence. Stu sends good fitting instructions with the chip, it's quite easy to swop (ECU is behind a wooden panel in the front of the passenger footwell, so access is pretty easy as that part of the footwell carpet is held on velcro).
