Cayenne 3.0 V6/2.9 S buying advice
Discussion
I'm currently weighing up the next family car purchase and a third generation Cayenne (likely around 2018 to 2021) is high on the list, alongside an X5 40i and a 540i touring.
I've got a good feel for BMW running costs and putting one on an extended warranty. However, I feel like I need to get some more information on the running costs of both the 3.0 V6 and 2.9 S petrol engines to get more comfortable with going ahead with what is my choice.
What are servicing costs/schedules like with OPCs/ good independents?
I would ideally put the car I go with through the 111 point check in order to then get a Porsche warranty, but have read some posts about big costs for the work required to get seemingly solid cars up to standard. Does anyone have any anecdotal experience of this with Cayennes between around 2018 to 2021?
I really want to start looking at and driving some examples, but would welcome some experienced insights first before getting ahead of myself.
Thanks
I've got a good feel for BMW running costs and putting one on an extended warranty. However, I feel like I need to get some more information on the running costs of both the 3.0 V6 and 2.9 S petrol engines to get more comfortable with going ahead with what is my choice.
What are servicing costs/schedules like with OPCs/ good independents?
I would ideally put the car I go with through the 111 point check in order to then get a Porsche warranty, but have read some posts about big costs for the work required to get seemingly solid cars up to standard. Does anyone have any anecdotal experience of this with Cayennes between around 2018 to 2021?
I really want to start looking at and driving some examples, but would welcome some experienced insights first before getting ahead of myself.
Thanks
Lots of previous threads on this topic if you search, so I will do my best not to repeat my other posts verbatim! I ran a 2018 Cayenne S from new, one of the first customer cars in the UK in April 2018, until I sold it earlier this year with about 48k miles on the clock.
I loved it for the most part. Fuel consumption was around 27mpg average, but it would comfortably beat 30mpg on a long sub-80mph motorway journey. Economy around town wasn't great, and you could get down into the teens if you made the most of the superb (for an SUV) handling, but that depends how you drive! The 2.9 had plenty of power and torque when revved, but I always felt it was a bit out of character for a 2+ tonne SUV, with more of an appetite for revs than the 3.0. It did make a nice noise though. My car had air suspension and rear axle steering, but not PDCC active anti-roll, and it handled beautifully. Now I'm a Range Rover owner, I now appreciate just how much attention Porsche pay to steering feel, even on a bus like the Cayenne; it was simply a joy. Brakes were also terrific, as you'd expect from Porsche.
Faults were mostly irritating trim and cosmetic issues, some covered under warranty, but lots excluded by the latest warranty terms. I had all the rear LEDs replaced due to water ingress (1cm deep puddles, not condensation), which was at least covered by warranty with a 4 figure bill. The gloss black b and c pillar trims came unstuck creating loads of wind noise, so were replaced also under warranty (about £900), but after a couple of years the replacements had all crazed with a network of tiny cracks, not covered under the new extended warranty terms. Dashboard leather came unglued and bubbled, again refused under warranty, which would have been a £5k bill had I not simply sold the car to a trader who didn't care about it. Seat leather also wore very quickly compared to my previous 958 (both with full smooth leather), with lots of sagging and creases, another indicator of build quality not being what it might have been. Bose front door woofers blew with annoying regularity, at first replaced under warranty, then they'd both started to rattle again when I sold the car, and would not have been covered due to being an "auditory" fault. Interior rattles had started to become more apparent, but it was 7 years old by the end, and I have to recognise that mine was a very early car, so perhaps more fault prone than one from a few years into production. Things like the whole PCM infotainment system needing to be replaced early on were almost certainly just examples of me being a live beta tester! Do have a look on Rennlist for other common faults, especially for higher mile cars. The auto transfer box still doesn't seem to be bulletproof, with some people complaining of jerky gear changes, and there's a common water pump fault on the 2.9 that requires a lot of the front end to be dismantled to get at. The early petrol cars have a LiFePO4 battery which often fails without warning, costing £2k for replacement. There's a retrofit kit to allow a regular battery to be used, but it invalidates your warranty, even if the battery isn't covered by that warranty! Later cars, I think from 2020-ish, switched back to a regular AGM battery.
You get the picture: it was a lovely car that I ran for 7 years, driving all over Europe, but which eventually started to expose some failings in Porsche's customer service and increasingly hostile application of the warranty small print. Labour rate is hilarious at OPCs, over £300 per hour at Reading (my Ferrari has cheaper labour at a main dealer!), so servicing is not cheap; I was generally paying £1,500 every couple of years for a routine oil service, once you included not-really-optional things like brake fluid changes and aircon refresh (without which aircon faults aren't warrantied). Big services, i.e. the ones with spark plugs and tranmission fluid changes, could be £1000 more. On the plus side, the warranty at around £1,200 per year including Porsche Assist is still great value, even if anything relating to trim, noise and "optical" faults are now ruthlessly excluded. You do have to keep absolutely everything unmodified and OEM to maintain the Porsche warranty, so that's something to bear in mind: cheap warranty necessitates expensive parts and labour.
One last point: if you're comparing with marques like BMW, watch the Cayenne spec carefully. Mine was not crazily spec'd, but the options totalled almost £20k when it was new. Admittedly it had big ticket items like a pano roof, electric tow bar, rear steer, matrix lights, active cruise, full leather etc etc, but the point is that almost *everything* is optional and specified individually rather than as a package. The main spec change in the life of the E3 Cayenne was the change from PCM 5 to PCM 6 in about 2022, which improved the infotainment, but frankly with the free "full-screen" Carplay software mod applied, mine still felt plenty modern enough, and was still getting Porsche map updates every quarter.
TLDR: take care with early car build quality, be prepared for big hourly labour rates or find a good indy, but it's one of the best SUVs out there, especially if you appreciate how well it drives.
I loved it for the most part. Fuel consumption was around 27mpg average, but it would comfortably beat 30mpg on a long sub-80mph motorway journey. Economy around town wasn't great, and you could get down into the teens if you made the most of the superb (for an SUV) handling, but that depends how you drive! The 2.9 had plenty of power and torque when revved, but I always felt it was a bit out of character for a 2+ tonne SUV, with more of an appetite for revs than the 3.0. It did make a nice noise though. My car had air suspension and rear axle steering, but not PDCC active anti-roll, and it handled beautifully. Now I'm a Range Rover owner, I now appreciate just how much attention Porsche pay to steering feel, even on a bus like the Cayenne; it was simply a joy. Brakes were also terrific, as you'd expect from Porsche.
Faults were mostly irritating trim and cosmetic issues, some covered under warranty, but lots excluded by the latest warranty terms. I had all the rear LEDs replaced due to water ingress (1cm deep puddles, not condensation), which was at least covered by warranty with a 4 figure bill. The gloss black b and c pillar trims came unstuck creating loads of wind noise, so were replaced also under warranty (about £900), but after a couple of years the replacements had all crazed with a network of tiny cracks, not covered under the new extended warranty terms. Dashboard leather came unglued and bubbled, again refused under warranty, which would have been a £5k bill had I not simply sold the car to a trader who didn't care about it. Seat leather also wore very quickly compared to my previous 958 (both with full smooth leather), with lots of sagging and creases, another indicator of build quality not being what it might have been. Bose front door woofers blew with annoying regularity, at first replaced under warranty, then they'd both started to rattle again when I sold the car, and would not have been covered due to being an "auditory" fault. Interior rattles had started to become more apparent, but it was 7 years old by the end, and I have to recognise that mine was a very early car, so perhaps more fault prone than one from a few years into production. Things like the whole PCM infotainment system needing to be replaced early on were almost certainly just examples of me being a live beta tester! Do have a look on Rennlist for other common faults, especially for higher mile cars. The auto transfer box still doesn't seem to be bulletproof, with some people complaining of jerky gear changes, and there's a common water pump fault on the 2.9 that requires a lot of the front end to be dismantled to get at. The early petrol cars have a LiFePO4 battery which often fails without warning, costing £2k for replacement. There's a retrofit kit to allow a regular battery to be used, but it invalidates your warranty, even if the battery isn't covered by that warranty! Later cars, I think from 2020-ish, switched back to a regular AGM battery.
You get the picture: it was a lovely car that I ran for 7 years, driving all over Europe, but which eventually started to expose some failings in Porsche's customer service and increasingly hostile application of the warranty small print. Labour rate is hilarious at OPCs, over £300 per hour at Reading (my Ferrari has cheaper labour at a main dealer!), so servicing is not cheap; I was generally paying £1,500 every couple of years for a routine oil service, once you included not-really-optional things like brake fluid changes and aircon refresh (without which aircon faults aren't warrantied). Big services, i.e. the ones with spark plugs and tranmission fluid changes, could be £1000 more. On the plus side, the warranty at around £1,200 per year including Porsche Assist is still great value, even if anything relating to trim, noise and "optical" faults are now ruthlessly excluded. You do have to keep absolutely everything unmodified and OEM to maintain the Porsche warranty, so that's something to bear in mind: cheap warranty necessitates expensive parts and labour.
One last point: if you're comparing with marques like BMW, watch the Cayenne spec carefully. Mine was not crazily spec'd, but the options totalled almost £20k when it was new. Admittedly it had big ticket items like a pano roof, electric tow bar, rear steer, matrix lights, active cruise, full leather etc etc, but the point is that almost *everything* is optional and specified individually rather than as a package. The main spec change in the life of the E3 Cayenne was the change from PCM 5 to PCM 6 in about 2022, which improved the infotainment, but frankly with the free "full-screen" Carplay software mod applied, mine still felt plenty modern enough, and was still getting Porsche map updates every quarter.
TLDR: take care with early car build quality, be prepared for big hourly labour rates or find a good indy, but it's one of the best SUVs out there, especially if you appreciate how well it drives.
Pete’s post sums up my ownership experience of a 2018 3.0, which we ran for around 5 years. We didnt have quite as many warranty issues with the interior but got rid of it earlier this year after numerous attempts by Porsche to fix a continuously faulty PCM system. We loved ours - it was the right side of cossetting but still steered well, even if it felt a little breathless when pushing on. I also drove the 2.9 for numerous long journeys and my impressions are the same as Pete’s, it needed plenty of reva to get going but was a nicer engine overall, albeit by a small margin.
We then bought a 12 month old latest shape Cayenne and got rid of it after 4 months. The value engineering was too obvious, the ride was poor despite the air suspension and it just felt a large step backwards as far as quality was concerned, even with nearly £30k of options.
We then bought a 12 month old latest shape Cayenne and got rid of it after 4 months. The value engineering was too obvious, the ride was poor despite the air suspension and it just felt a large step backwards as far as quality was concerned, even with nearly £30k of options.
Thank you both for providing insights in to your ownership experiences.
Definitely gives me something to think about, whilst also being clear how well you rated your Cayennes.
Certainly confirms my sense that a Porsche warranty would be essential, although makes me wonder how much work a car might need to pass the 111 point check.
Makes some of the Porsche approved cars look good value given the certainty they would provide. Unfortunately they seem to be fairly lightly spec'd compared to the non OPC cars currently available.
Definitely gives me something to think about, whilst also being clear how well you rated your Cayennes.
Certainly confirms my sense that a Porsche warranty would be essential, although makes me wonder how much work a car might need to pass the 111 point check.
Makes some of the Porsche approved cars look good value given the certainty they would provide. Unfortunately they seem to be fairly lightly spec'd compared to the non OPC cars currently available.
Gassing Station | Front Engined Porsches | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff