Scottish Elises

Perhaps a rather biased conversation to start on here however it’s a thought going through my mind.

Anyone had any experience of 996's at all?

By the looks of things I will need to start using the car more for work so the Exige may have to go. (I've never been a good decision maker)
One morning I wake up and love the Exige for the daily commute, the next day I hate it!

Would I be moving into a car with a much greater running cost? Do they go wrong? Any thoughts and/or experiences appreciated.

Total arm chair view having never owned either:

996 is the heavier car so may use its tyres (huge tyres mind) and brakes more (huge brakes mind) so I can only guess they will be pricey to replace vs similar items for the Exige.

I thought about a 996 last year and did some research and an acronym that came up a lot was RMS (Rear Main Seal) issues which I don't know a lot about but know they can be bad and expensive to put right.

I'm sure it would be a great commuter but I imagine would cost a lot more to service and maintain than the Exige.

Also, you'd be driving a Porsche and no one would ever let you out of a junction

craignicol wrote:Perhaps a rather biased conversation to start on here however it’s a thought going through my mind.

Anyone had any experience of 996's at all?

By the looks of things I will need to start using the car more for work so the Exige may have to go. (I've never been a good decision maker)
One morning I wake up and love the Exige for the daily commute, the next day I hate it!

Would I be moving into a car with a much greater running cost? Do they go wrong? Any thoughts and/or experiences appreciated.

I have just been in the same scenrio as you Craig, moved out of town and started commuting. Some days the exige would do it for me other i wish i had something else.. i have decided to take the nice weather as a sign to sell and get best price i can before winter arrives.

Looked at 996 as well, but i wanted a slightly newer car for the sort of cash, so opt'd for an A5.

i think i would go for a 996 turbo again if i was going to have that choice. The c4s has the same suspension, brakes, tyres as the turbo so similar running costs but doesn't have the tremendous shove of the turbo hence when i had the choice i bought a turbo. Turbo has a GT1 based engine which doesn't have RMS problems and is a virtually bombproof engine. Have a shot of both as there's plenty available but a turbo at 30k,ish is a huge amount of car

Craig - If you got rid of your deafening exhaust I'm sure you'd find the commute a lot more bearable

i looked at 996s...but couldnt stand the dashboard...very low rent in my opinion. Id save up for a 997 or get a cayman instead. I was always tempted by a maser 4200gt. My understanding is the rear main seal issue was resolved with the facelift model 996s...though living in scotland i see the logic of a c4:-)

Ihad a 2001 996 C2 and it was problem free.
Contrary to popular opinion , RMS is still a real problem today as it was ten years ago. I must admit my paranoia made me always check the drive for any signs of oil.
My cousin's 4 week old Panamera blew its engine and he has asked for his money back!

My car was standard apart from a Sports Silencer which had "Semi" inducing properties at 5000 revs



Dealer servicing on the 996 is no worse than a lot of the other Marques and consumables like tyres are an eye popping £240 a corner every 15000 miles.
If you buy privately, get the seller to undertake a Porsche Warranty inspection
Extended warranty varies from model to model but budget for £1000 per annum
Porsche sales are on the floor just now so my advice would be to haggle hard and buy from a OPC as they are now offering two years warranty on Porsche Approved used stock

Hi craig,

Apologies before i begin, this is a long post.

ive just done the swap in the opposite way from you, coming from an 03 911 C4S to an exige S. I will give you some of my views (good and bad) but please remember these are my personal views and others may be different (Im not looking to be shot at by every other porsche owner on here).

Physical properties,

1. cars a good bit bigger and has a reasonable ish back seat so you can fit burd or mates + luggage etc all at once, altho people in the back is not really advisable for any real length of time.

2. build quality is usually excellent, you would notice about 1% of the rattles and squeaks

3. speed/ manouverability, obv its not an exige but it is reasonably quick off the mark, once you get used to the handling they are brilliant and it was by far the best car out of all my mates even in the heavy rain or snow. Where i found it really gets your blood flowing is hard acceleration once your up past 70/80. Where your brains thinking the car should be starting to ease up it just keeps pulling wel into going to jail figures. When I first got mine I waited till about 2am mid week and went for a real blast down the quiet back roads in the middle of now where, the first night i was a bit disappointed, then I realised i wasnt going quick enough, after a couple of days (on track of course) and got my corner exit speeds up and a bit braver i realised thats it at the higher speeds this car came into its own.

Comfort, as much as they are sporty they are effectively grand tourers aswell and you can comfortably sit for 7 or 8 hours in them, I drove from london without stopping and was genuinely okay when i got home (altho my back teeth were floating)

Image (if it matters to you)

A 996 will give you that "Ive got a porsche feeling" and that "its a 911" over caymans and boxsters but it will give you that "should ve saved a bit more" when you see a nice 9972s or turbo of any description. In all the porsches Ive had, I only ever had one hater (D*ckhead - Im counting the days till we meet again) but I got a lot of nice comments, looks etc. Funnily enough the boy that bought mine told me he was keeping it without a plate so people new it was 5/6 years old so he didnt need to explain it wasnt as expensive as they thought (same reason I did)

Running costs

expect pretty much consistently 20 - 23mpg (Superunleaded)
as about £250 per corner for tyres
Brakes £200-£500 per corner for discs and pads. - Pay carefull attention to the discs, Porsche discs are two different compounds one on outside but inside has iron it it so they corrode and can only bee seen if on the ramp. can be a costly miss.
Service - £300 - £600, if its not a network car (see below) use indy's as OPC or Official Porsche centres can hike this up quite easily.
Im pretty picky when buying and the above is so far all Ive had to deal with.

Warranty

If you buy a car through an OPC it will have a years warranty, this costs £225 for an inspection, plus whatever they tell you it needs plus £1150 for the years warranty cost.
The warranty details have changed very recently and the warranty will be void if any work is "found out" to be done outside the network. This will include tyres now.
One of the other changes is that if you buy from a non OPC they may still be advertising that the car has a remaining manufacturers warranty, this warranty is now not transferrable through a dealer. in other words its void. The warranty is tranferrable through a private sale though.
Also - remember you cant buy an AAP+L or tescos or any other warranty. There are some indy's who do their own but they are all down south to my knowledge.

Issues

RMS - check with the owner if its been changed, its not a massive deal contrary to public opinion and relates to about a 50p size bit of oil for every couple of months. Any car thats been done by an OPC will be on record so you can phone porsche to find out what invoices have been issued against a car. In saying the above do your best to get one thats been changed/fixed as there is a lot of stigma and nevousness about this come resale time.
Brakes - see corrosion above
The C4S engine really needs to be used and warmed up correctly so dont go for a seriously low mileage garage queen, try to find somebody whos used it but its a p+j.

Before buying get an inspection, use STUP a poster on pistonheads, he's reckoned to be one of the best inspectors in the North of the Uk. Also if possible get it onto a diog machine, they can tell the total running hours, ave revs so it can give a good indication that milage is correct and amount of time being ragged/tracked etc.

Go and see Kenny dunn in edinburgh, the standard you should be looking for is what he supplies (although you may want to aim for that quality and find it slightly cheaper down south).

All in all, take your time, check it out throughly and buy the best you can, budget for your fuel and 2-3k a year (3-3.5 if warranty to pay for). You will have a great car and lots of enjoyment.

Hope this helps and apologies again for a lengthy waffling post.

Flip

Flip, that's a really useful post.. Well done for putting the effort in.

Great post Flip.
My only Porsche experience is 4 weeks of owning a 996 Turbo so can't add much other than say that on a superficial level that the Turbo is is blisteringly fast so assume the C4S will be fairly quick also.

I had a major service done at OPC Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago and although they have a fixed price menu for servicing across all Porsche dealerships there still seemed to be a fair bit of room to haggle that down just by asking (ie reduced from £1050 to £850)

Not really sure that the back seats offer much practicality for anything other than a quick trip to the shops unless either the folk in the front or the folk in the back are dwarves. Infact, until I got one I hadn't realised that 911's were actually so compact.

Since getting the car home I seem to be getting 24mpg according to the trip computer although it was showing 38mpg with the cruise control on at 70mpg on the motorway.

I like mine, although the phrases that spring to mind (apart from blisteringly fast) are more like "functional, effective and discrete" rather than anything with more feeling or character.

I had a C4 for 3 years, by far the longest I ever kept a car. They are extremely competent cars, capable of phenomenal road speeds with anyone behind the wheel. By that I mean you don't have to be a driving god to get 95% out of them, the last 5% is a different matter but you would have to crazy to get to that limit on the road. Mechanically they are pretty bullet proof, but agree with Flip that you have to be picky about what you are buying. RMS isn't a major concern if that is all it is, the problem with RMS (rear main seal failure) is on low mileage engines it can be a symptom of something else entirely, this make the inspection even more critical. I would forget the base 996 models with the 3.4 engine, to old now and so many on the market (you can pick one up for 13k), but most will have lead a hard life unless you find a one owner car that's be looked after. Better off saving a few quid more and going for a 997, this of coarse depends on your budget but they improved quite a lot of things on the 997 model over the 996. 997 are starting to slide towards the sub 30k barrier so you should be able to get hold of one privately. If you go OPC you will be paying very top book price for a late 996 and chances are it's going to be around this price point anyway. There are some very good specialist resellers about but you will have to travel to see them.
The downside is after having had the car a while I found it a bit uninvolving at least until you get to crazy speeds for the road. At this point it's not so much what the car is going to do that becomes the problem but other road users who have no idea how quick your traveling, so it's not really exploitable performance on the road unless you join the 3am club, and from what I've seen yes there is one especially during light summer Sunday mornings. Book figures for these cars don't tell the whole story, standard cars pull 60mph in a little over 5secs, 100mph in 12+ but it just keeps pulling, it's like that way past 140, just linear acceleration. I found you would be trundling down the road thinking everybody is going really slow when in fact your comfortably killing miles at license loosing speeds, it was just so easy.
Also agree with Flip with the "wish I had saved more and bought one of them" feeling every time you see a model higher but I guess that's a Porsche hierarchy thing.
If I was getting another I would pick either 996 series 2 GT3 or 997S with the 3.8 engine but that's me. At the very least get a C4S with the 3.6 as they corrected a lot of the problems the 3.4 had with that engine (also up'ed the power) and as it was a more expensive car to buy it will have been through less owners than a stock 996. Turbo's have much higher service cost BTW than the standard cars but Jim is right they do have fixed price servicing which in theory makes then no more expensive to buy and run than a Mitsiscubby or indeed an M3.
I notice in your post you'd be using it for commuting, it'll handle that with ease and will do the car no harm at all being used regularly. Nothing kills a 911 quicker than sitting still, mine used to take 2-3 days to loosen up when I came back from offshore if the misses hadn't used it. The OPC warranty thing sounds expensive but it doesn't take much to break for you to sail past 1k. Labour at OPC was £115 an hour and parts are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Older cars have a tendency to need suspension bushes but you can't buy the bush you have to buy the control arm which range from £150 -270 plus fitting and there is loads of the damned things on a 911. Flip is quite correct about the disc's, never needed to change a set of pads because they were worn but because the disc's need done. Usually about 18mths they would last, less if it lives outside. You can have them skimmed though if the pitting isn't to deep or buy carbon ceramic discs, but they are 5k.
One day I may well buy another one as they are very good cars, only problem in Aberdeen is they are as common as Sh!te, every second cars a bloody Porsche up here or at least seams that way when you have one but that's Aberdeen for you.

One other thing, spec. Porsche charge a fortune for optional extras on new cars so if you find on with a bunch of toys, OBC, PCM, SAT NAV, Phone, heated seats, upgraded leather interior, big wheels etc etc they make resale a lot easier as there are loads and loads with next to none.

Everybody should own one at least once, good value for money now as they have become the victims of there own success. Sold so many cars now that second hand price have tumbled compared to the 993 days.

My 2p.

mikie - i had in my mind that there wasn't that big a difference between the servicing cost on my carrera 2 and my turbo? Had a quick look at the service menu and theres only £40 difference between each for a minor service and the £500 difference in a major service is the plug change which only needs done every 4 years, so over the term of ownership i don't think there would be that much in it imho. Regards discs etc C4S and Turbo use all the same so was going to cost the same to change in either and one of them didn't have the same go as the other so was part of my justification for a turbo, or so i told her
One thing i was hugely suprised with was how economical the 996's were when you weren't nipping on. On the turbo and the N/A both could manage 30mpg on a steady run which any of my subarus have struggled to match

Small service for a NA car is about £300, big is £540. Big service on the turbo is £1050 and is mileage based as well as time. They are dearer to insure as well as buy etc etc. That and they don't share many components in either the engine. Not sure about parts costs but a quick look round the usual suppliers seems that parts aren't any more expensive so maybe not that much more but then any turbo car in the 30k price bracket will need TLC over the life of ownership and be older then a similarly priced NA car. IYSWIM.
Any turbo in the 30-40k price range is going to be a 8-10 year old car, things will break and wear out at this age IMHO and experience. Especially if you drive it hard, which most will have been to some extent. I doubt Craig will be gentle I certainly wasn't once you get used to them.
While I think of it, another reason to buy a C4S over the standard car is that I think the normal 911 is under braked a problem they addressed on the C4S as it has the same brakes as the Turbo.

I am not knocking them, far from it. I just think you have to go into Porsche ownership with your eyes open. With so many cars knocking around now it's quite possible to buy a 911 for the same price as a new hot hatch and in some cases less. But, get it wrong and you will be looking at a money pit that will be difficult to sell on. As they pass to 2nd,3rd, 4th owners the servicing will be done at OPC, Specialist then Joe round the corner and some of the stuff that would need doing will get missed that and bodged repairs poor workmanship will start to show up on these cars. If you are buy in the sub 20k price band it isn't going to be coming from an OPC and you won't get OPC warranty on anything over 8 years old if it's still the same. 30k and your into 997 territory, all be it an early one with some miles on it 40 -50k, 05 plate. Newer car than the 996 and it's where my money would go. Yes you can get a Turbo at this price but it'll be a private sale on a 02/03 car so OPC won't warranty that, big risk to take with 30k on a 8 year old car. Why an inspection is important or deep pockets, but if you have the latter then buy a newer car.

It's easy for everybody that's had good experiences with them to say "ye go buy one, they great and not that expensive" but I have heard of quite a few that ended with blown engines, trashed gearboxes, etc. A new exhaust system for these things runs well over a grand, back boxes are £700 for cheap ones so they can end up as wallet emptying experiences if you get it wrong. Not like you are going to shove it in the mart and sell it for what ever if you buy a mule and there are plenty out there waiting for the unsuspecting buyer.

Prices for these things are all over the place, there's one for every budget within reason. Get a good 'un and you will have a car that will put a smile on your face mile after mile. Turn any back road into a race track and journey into a joy. They haven't been the bench mark for 40 years for no good reason. IMHO they are quite simply the very best pound for pound performance car you can buy, until the R8 came along nothing run them close.
Buy a bad one and it will end in tears................ yours.

I do see what your saying but don't agree! The big service quoted is only once every 4 years or 40k, if i remember right, and is normally only £500ish, same as the C4S. Both turbo and C4S are group 20 and my turbo was cheaper to insure than my carrera 2, no idea why, there is next to no difference in insuring them in my experience. I agree that they don't share engine components but thats the bonus as the weak link in the NA is the engine with RMS related issues and it will be an older car but only by approx 2 years at a guess, 03 C4S v an 01 Turbo but condition will come down to the car you buy and the effort into getting a good one
Not having a go, just been through all this before when i made the choice and I never once regretted getting the Turbo and just wanted to help others going through the same thought process and hopefully give the benefit of my experience.
ps if you go for a C4S you might just always have the nagging thought you should have gone for a turbo

Not disagreeing with you at all. If you can afford one and find the right one then go for it I would. But the same holds true for any in the range, cheaper they get the greater the risk of buy someone elses nightmare. Get a properly looked after car that is in good condition, like you said someones pride and joy then your on a winner. But it's not the kind of car that you go and look at with your mate who knows a bit about them. That's what happens now that they are sub 20k, happened when I was selling mine. The amount of Porsche experts that came tire kicking, was as funny as it was annoying.

Bottom line,
1. Take your time, there's literally hundreds of the things around from 13.5k upwards.
2. I would stay away from anything "tuned" or blinged.
3. Clean, original cars with full OP sevice history or with known specialist history for earlier cars.
4. Get it inspected by OPC or someone who specializes in Porsche inspections and knows what they are looking at.
5. If you can get a diagnostic print out from the ECU it'll give you an idea about how it's been driven.
6. OPC warranty, budget for it. Any seller who doesn't want their car going for that inspection, walk away.
7. Simplest way is to buy it from Porsche but you will be paying a premium for that. You didn't think that cup of coffee was free did you

Take the time, put in the effort and you will end up with one of the best cars going.