There's an interesting post on feedback on 73 cars (including my totally reliable one!) on Pistonheads - see
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&t=400915
If you don't want to wade through all 13 pages (so far), there's a summary of stats on page 12.
Personally, I would agree with the comments made above that more people are likely to talk about / post about problems than post they have had no problems, so I wouldn't go by the headline figures. In fact, it would be good for everyone on here to add to this Pistonheads thread to make it more balanced.
But the fact of the matter is that early 996 engines (and boxsters for that matter), have not found to be as reliable (in terms of major failure) as those found in (say) a late 993 or a Volkswagen golf for example. You only have to look at the number of adverts that refer to a replacement engine and that fact that companies such as Autofarm and Hartech have invested a lot of time and money developing 'solutions' such as their silco-watsit liners and re-engineered intermittent shafts to overcome such problems.
To put this into persepective, my view on this (and others on here / pistonheads) is:-
a) I'm ignoring RMS. It doesn't cost a huge amount to fix (same price as 4 tyres) and is non urgent, unless you have a carpeted garage! Interestingly, using your car more leads to less chance of an RMS issue - presumably as the seals get better lubrication. Also, the latest design of seal (I think porsche are on about their 7th redesign) seems to have stopped the problem from recurring.
b) Porsche has a reputation of ultimate reliability with their later aircooled models. The cars cost too much to make and they were about to go out of business in the early 1990s. I still have an old 964 sales brochure and the list price was something like 72,000 - and that was 1992. If they carried on at that rate, the 997 would be costing something like 130 - 140,000 pounds today! So something had to change in their build practices - that coupled with the requirement to change to a watercooled design, having perfected their aircooled design over 30+ years - meant that some shortcuts were taken and some teething problems crept. The fact that they had such an excellent reputation (bullet proof and all that) just made any failures seem worse.
c) The main problem (from reading other's posts - especially Baz Hartechs) is there are two points of weakness;
- 1) The bore liners are not well supported and/or thinner than they should be, causing some ovalling of the liner, with usage, potentially leading to crack and/or chunk breaking off. As noted above, various companies have solutions for this. Porsche will replace the whole engine (12K if you don't have the warrantee) or others will replace the bore liners - either just the one that has failed or all depending on your budget.
- 2) The intermittent shaft sometimes spontaneously fails causing swarf contamination in the engine, recking the whole thing. The latest thoughts on this (from others) is that there are not enough or not best positioned crankcase bearings, causing some shaft bending. This, it seems, happens under engine braking when letting clutch out in lower gear and hence why tiptronics seems to suffer less than manuals.
d) It is only a small percentage of cars that have problems, but if you have a catastrophic engine failure you're looking at a big sum of money to fix it if you don't have or are outstide a porsche warrantee. This then generates a lot of bad publicity as either you're looking at 9K to £12K to fix it (correct me if I'm wrong, but the 6.5K price for a bored out Autofarm engine quoted above is just for the parts and not labour to fix). This is either a huge percentage of a older car costing 20K to 25K or very unexpected if you've just spent 35K to 40K on a 3 to 4 year old car. It was for this reason I went for the OPC warrantee (895 per annum) up to the cars 9th birthday (to cover it till its 10 years old) - i.e as insurance against an expensive unexpected cost - it just has the added benefit of a replacement radiaor this year. Of course, not everyone will want to spend this sort of money on a warrantee, and will, more than likely, never ever have a problem. I just view it as part of the running costs and considering that my 996 is unlikely to depreciate anywhere near as much as other performance cars I have owned, don't mind the expense to give me peace of mind.
At the end of the day the 996 is a fantastic car - don't let a small number of cases of engine failure put you off going for one - just make a contingency plan in case the worst happens - then go out and enjoy it and use it a lot.
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