Thursday 26th March 2015

Porsche 996 Turbo: Catch it while you can

Porsche 911 bargains are becoming harder to find, but what about the 996 Turbo? Prices start at £24K...

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Porsche 911-land is a surreally strange world at the moment - a bit like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, in fact. Depending on whether or not Alice has taken a nibble out of a particular model, its value can grow mushroom-like to monstrous proportions, or remain a unloved minnow.

They're not depreciating anymore!

Look at 993 Turbo prices. These have long since headed to Brobdingnag, with prices well above £100K now being asked. Yet the 996 Turbo remains in purgatory. But I think there are very good reasons why that's all about to change.

You can already see the early signs of it happening. 996 Turbo prices bottomed out at an eye-wateringly low price of around £16K a couple of years ago, but they're now shifting - and shifting fast.

Here's why. The Turbo has been tarnished by the bristly brush of simply being a 996. After all, the water-cooled 996 engine has well-documented intermediary shaft issues, about which you'll find plenty of comment in the PH forums. But the 996 Turbo's Hans Mezger-designed engine uses the 993 crankcase - and therefore it suffers none of the regular 996's shaft woes.

So forget the curse of the fried-egg-face 996. Buyers are slowly cottoning on to the fact that the 996 Turbo is a highly desirable performance tool (fabulous 420hp engine, four-wheel drive and 0-62 in 4.2sec) that's also robust.

And not a single IMS/RMS issue to worry about

The 996 Turbo was a popular choice in its day (22,062 were built) so there's a broad choice of cars out there. Your entry point is no longer below £20K, but £24,000 still seems an absolute bargain for a 2002 Turbo Tiptronic. It may have highish miles at 92K but it has a full Porsche history.

Tiptronic actually quite suits the Turbo, but often such cars are used in cities for short journeys, which isn't great news for reliability; the Turbo needs to be driven, preferably hard and often. There will always be a hardcore following for manual cars, and I'm tempted by this one at £29,925 with 71K miles on the clock and a full history.

The majority of Turbos for sale fall into the £30K-£40K bracket, where there's a rich seam of fabulous machinery up for grabs. Even at the top end, prices remain affordable. One with just 18K miles is up in the classifieds for £42,950.

My advice is to get in now, grab yourself a relatively low-mileage Turbo with crystal clear evidence of having been properly cared for, pay £30-£35K for it and have a ball. If you're also able to sit back and watch values head in the same direction as 993 Turbos, so much the better - it's surely only a matter of time.

[corcoran]

" There will always be a hardcore following for manual cars, and I'm tempted by this one at £29,925 with 71K miles on the clock and a full history."


Silver with a grey interior? Shoot. Myself. In. The. Face.