What could possibly go wrong? 13k 1999 carrera

http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/cto/5098718681.html

Burns oil but runs great. Ummmm if it were a hardtop it would probably be mine.

What does grm say? Go for it or let this one pass.

No where is it mentioned that they have a title. I would ask about that.

There is nothing more expensive than a cheap 911

In reply to dean1484:

Clean Title No Accidents -so it says in pa pretty hard to get tags without all the right paperwork , title, insurance , bill of sale, etc...

Why does it say $13k in the title, $18k in the body and talk about being auctioned?

In reply to bgkast:

Probably means you'll be murdered......hard tops go for upper teens, you'd be better off going there OP.

I want a 996.

A buddy just bought a 1999 Carrera 4 with 95k miles for well under $20k. It had a bunch of recent maintenance and has been a blast to drive, so he reports. He bought it to flip, but he, his wife and his kids like it so much that he's going to keep it for now.

I know Porsche repair prices are scary, but the 911 is overall a pretty reliable proposition. I think $15,000 - $16,000 would put you in a car that has 50,000 carefree miles ahead of you. BUT, I would not buy it at $13K and not put another $2K into it immediately.

Is this an IMS failure car? I think it might be. In that case, you want to immediately drain the oil and send a sample off to be analyzed. If it comes back with a scary report, that's a car you want to sell right away.

'99s aren't quite that prone to IMS failure as the later cars (the bearing design got changed a few times).

However, two things would put me off - the "burns oil at startup" part (mine's got more miles on it that this thing and doesn't puff out anything at startup and that was before the engine refresh) and the lack of the hardtop. IIRC the hardtop came with all of the convertibles.

I'd also inspect the roof very closely as those are really price to replace. One of the cars I looked at locally had had a new roof fitted and the owner got a few hundred bucks' change out of $10k.

Sounds like a bad AOS to me. With a PPI from a reputable Porsche shop, it might be worth it.

Maybe. It might also be something considerably more expensive. PPI is the way to go with these, but keep in mind that mine got a clean bill of health during the PPI and needed an engine refresh three months later.

IMS failure? I thought 911s were immune to that and that applied to Boxster and Cayman only?

In reply to kanaric:

No, they're not immune to IMS failures - 911s of that vintage (996s and 997s) have the same basic engine, just with bigger displacement with the exception of the turbos, GT2s and GT3s.

In reply to BoxheadTim:

I was really searching for boxter s, when this appeared. Probably going to stick to my original thought of boxster s.

I thought the s's didn't have all the IMS drama the non s had. Is my thinking flawed?

Time to hit the interweb, forums and pelican.

Boxster, Boxster S and the non-turbo, non-racy 911s all share the basic M96/M97 engine, just with different displacements. Some early Boxsters also suffered from "D-Chunking" (parts of the cylinder bore wall making a bid for freedom), but IIRC that's the only problem that's Boxster specific.

There are also other potential fun issues like disintegrating cam/IMS chain guides, the aforementioned AOS, leaking RMS, but I think that's mostly it.

According to my local tame Porsche specialist, a lot of the problems came from people servicing the cars by the book, if you find one that's had the oil changed more often and generally kept the maintenance schedule at about half of what Porsche recommends, the likelihood of expensive incidents is much lower.