Hacker News Reader

Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

They are pretty darn reliable cars when you consider how much performance they squeeze out of them, and how uncompromising the driving experience is. Moreover, that they can handle being driven HARD day in and day out for decades and stay reliable- something really no other car make can do.

I bought an old Porsche Boxster for cheap on Craigslist and commute daily with no breakdowns for the last 3 years... it's not a Toyota- it's reliable because I spend A LOT of my free time doing preventative maintenance on it. While it requires a lot of maintenance, a cheap economy car would be toast in a few days if driven as hard as I drive this thing. Yet in stock form I could take it to the track and keep up with crazy unreliable exotic supercars that cost 30x what I paid for it.

View on HN

Agreed. Bought a 10 years old Porsche 911 for use as my daily driver (still cost a bomb, because Singapore). Great performance and reliable. And a real head turner. And surprisingly parts are readily available (for some reason, UK is the place to import them from, for cheap)

Yep, that's where they shine. There are always cars that are "more", but few that can be used as hard as Porsches. When you fall out of love with something more exciting because it spends more time in the shop than on the road, the Porsche is always there ready to go.

IMS bearing??

IMS issues are way overblown, failures are actually fairly rare, and permanently fixed by swapping out the bearing when you do the clutch, which is easy to do and doesn't cost much. Mine already had an LN Engineering retrofit kit when I got it, as do most of the used cars I've seen for sale.... but I've sometimes seen them with 200-300k miles on the original IMS as well.

My main issue with the early watercooled flat 6 Porsche engines is that they are just so complex and costly to rebuild. They will easily last several hundred thousand miles of hard use, but when they do need a rebuild, doing it properly can easily cost $10k just for materials to rebuild it yourself properly.

I just thought it was a funny retort to a seeming assertion that they were extremely reliable.

Although I think I only got $9k for my old Boxster, so a $10k rebuild seems a bit painful... I imagine they go for more now. I didn't love the car, unfortunately.

That issue, while valid, has one of the highest ratios of "talked about on the forums divided by frequency of occurrence". If I had a 1997-2005 affected engine, I don't think I'd do the preventative maintenance work proactively until it came time to replace a clutch anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com