How much do you spend/budget on servicing & maintenance?

[Megaflow]

Per year. Literally just servicing, maintenance and repairs. No tax, insurance and fuel.

I’m currently at £660, and from another thread I started, a small rant about broken gear cables at £400, a few people are suggesting it should be £2000-3000.

Over the 5 years I have owned it that is 50%-75% what I pad for the car, without all the other running costs!

[Megaflow]

curvature said:

This interesting as I’m thinking of getting rid of my 640d GC and having a fairly plain car for my day to day travels of 20k a year and then having a weekend car.

I’ve been looking at M4’s but the Cayman has also caught my eye as a more grown up/civilised sports car.

What mileages are we talking about for these costs.

Good question, I am doing about 4K a year with no track days.

I’m going to talk to my dad over the weekend as well, because he has had Boxster’s and a Cayman for ~15 years and I don’t remember him paying anything like the numbers some people are talking about.

[Megaflow]

LennyM1984 said:

In terms of required maintenance and repairs, I probably spend ~£500 per year (maybe less). I have elected to spend more than that on verious upgrades/proactive maintenance but last year it only actually needed a coffin arm (£77), a geo (£130), and oil/filters (I use Millers so ~£100 per time). That is with about 4k miles spread between road use and ~7 track days (I usually change the oil every 4 track days).

I think a lot of it depends on whether you do the work yourself or use a garage. I opted to do my crossover pipes earlier this year and the parts cost me £200. If I had paid to have them done at a garage, it would have been £800+. Likewise, the gear cables themselves are not hugely expensive (about £150 if I recall) but add labour to that and it all starts to add up.

My car is not worth a great deal (high mileage, stone chips, and a load of track day stickers under the bonnet) and so for me, DIY servicing/repairs makes perfect sense. On my other cars (which are newer and owe me more) I opt for main dealer servicing through a combination of laziness (I don't love them enough to do it myself) and resale. Hence, I totally get why some people would choose to pay this premium for their Boxster/Cayman.

nonetheless, I think £3k a year on average seems a bit steep. £1500 sounds more nomal (regular servicing plus a few costly repairs every few years)

Now, see that is interesting. They toy cars I had before, a Westfield and S1 Elise, DIY servicing and maintenance was a given and expected for the first and the second was not unusual and not a problem. But I bought the Porsche at 6 years old and was very conscious that the expectations about servicing and maintenance were very different in the market place, and it is for a <10 year old car. But on a much older Porsche, a bit of DIY is not a problem, at what point does that relationship change? I think I need to be less scared of doing a bit of work on it and it’s future value as much.

[Megaflow]

I had a small rant on another thread because maybe me was just about to cost me £405 for gear cables, but in hindsight what I was more pissed off about was this is the only car that has ever needed transporting home in 26 years and the recovery took 5 hours.

In that other thread, a fleet manager of transport company, suggested that I was deluding myself and needing to budget £3k a year to run it. This, admittedly, small data set suggests him is the tool I thought he is.