upgrade from Cayman... 996 turbo?
Discussion
cvega said:
997 out of my price range (turbo). Want moar power.
Is 996 turbo worth getting into ? reliability wise. Running costs? borderline horrendous or not ? IMS/bore scoring ?
I went from an 08 Cayman S to an 03 Turbo. (While I loved the Cayman S it lost something after being smashed by an '89 Volvo! Like the ability to ever run again...)Is 996 turbo worth getting into ? reliability wise. Running costs? borderline horrendous or not ? IMS/bore scoring ?
Anyhow, in June of 2009 I found a low miles (10K) 2003 996 Turbo. Given the low miles I wanted a warranty and it came with a 2 year 100K mile CPO warranty. I put around 50K miles on it before the warranty expired in June of 2011.
The car has been reliable but not without problems. Under warranty the car had a broken radiator fan shaft, noisy idler roller bearing, bad clutch accumulator/slave cylinder, broken shifter linkage, leaking 6-speed transmission. All taken care of under CPO warranty, the transmission being replaced with one shipped over from the factory.
Out of warranty I had to take care of a noisy high pressure valve in the power steering tank: new tank to get the valve: $1000. Then the spoiler hydraulics failed and that cost $2000 to replace the spoiler hydraulics. And I just got the car back the other day after having the RMS replaced: $1625.89.
Side note: The clutch disc wear limit is 0.3mm measured from the disc friction surface to the flanged side of the rivet. This disc measured 1.7mm. This is BTW (believe it or not) the new disc dimension. The clutch disc looks almost brand new and in 110K miles has not experienced hardly any wear. (Now you know how I have managed to get 270K miles out of my Boxster's original clutch.)
Anyhow, while the Turbo is very nice, powerful, comfortable, I was a little let down by the number of problems though all but the spoiler and RMS occurred within 50K miles so technically they would have been covered by the new car warranty had the first owner driven the car 50K miles in 4 years instead of just 10K miles in 6 years. Now by comparison my 02 Boxster had no problems other a leaking RMS between 0 and 80K miles.
Oh, no IMS bearing. The Turbo engine is a different design and has a different IMS (layshaft) which is gear driven and runs with pressure fed plain bearings. No bore scoring that I've ever heard or read.
The Turbo engine is quite reliable but any engine is only as strong as its weakest part. But overall the Turbo engine is (nearly) bullet proof.
Find one stock. Find one taken care of. Find one that passes a thorough test ride/drive test. Get the car PPI'd. But the car if it checks out.
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