$15,000 Porsche: Are we stupid, or the smartest bargain hunters you know?

Update by Tom Suddard to the Porsche Cayman project car
Mar 20, 2023 | Porsche, Cayman

“Hey, my friend just got a $15,000 bill from the Porsche dealership. Want to buy a broken Porsche?!”

How could I say no to an ambiguous offer like that? On the other end of the line was a longtime friend who’d realized his dreams and moved to Seattle to work in the tech industry. An industry that, as it turns out, is full of cool, lightly used sports cars and people that no longer want to own them. If you’d asked me a week ago if I wanted to buy a Porsche, I’d have told you I wasn’t in the market. But there’s something about a great deal that’s hard to resist….

So I made contact with the owner, whose pitch was simple: Their car, a 2014 Porsche Cayman, no longer had fifth or sixth gear but otherwise drove fine.

The dealer’s proposed solution? Replacing the transmission with a brand-new unit, to the tune of $15,000 in parts and labor. Rather than spend nearly half the value of the car on a repair, they wanted to walk away from it and commute in their E30 BMW instead.

There was only one problem: The seller had no photos, and the car was trapped at the Porsche dealership across town. They eventually sent these two pictures, saying they weren’t a “lots of photos of my car” kind of person and adding that their car was “the one on the left.”

Yeah, not exactly the sort of material I’m willing to base a five-figure purchase on. So my buddy and I hatched a plan. He’d go to the Porsche dealer claiming to have lost a flash drive in his buddy’s Cayman, then use the fruitless search to open every door and photograph every angle.

The ruse worked perfectly, and a day later I had a folder with 100 close-up shots. They showed a car that was filthy from weeks in the service lot, but otherwise in good condition and reasonably well taken care of.

The VIN came back clean, too, showing a spotless history and a true 67,000 miles on the odometer. Without transmission issues, I estimated this car to be worth about $35,000.

Based on some initial conversations with the seller, I figured it could be purchased for roughly half that total. So I offered to buy it sight-unseen for $14,000–no more inspections or second opinions, just a check in the mail.

Was that a smart move? Absolutely not–buying this car would mean smashing my piggy bank and rolling the dice on a plan riddled with holes and unknowns. It’s a horrible idea, but I couldn’t resist the potential: I’d never think about buying a modern Porsche in a million years, but this one seemed to be in reach.

Or not: That offer didn’t go over well. In fact, I fear I offended the seller when they said they were going to pursue other options. “No problem,” I said, “Just give me a call if you change your mind.”

A few weeks later, my phone rang again: If I was willing to pay $15,000, the car was mine. I wrote up a basic contract guaranteeing the car would run and would be delivered to my friend’s Seattle driveway with a clean title.

In return, my friend would hand the seller my check for $15,000. And it’s my pleasure to report that despite the early red flags, the transaction went off without a hitch: I’m now the proud owner of a broken 981-chassis Porsche Cayman.

Which begs the question: Now what?

See, I don’t live in Seattle, I live in Florida. Between me and the car is 3500 miles, $15,000 in repairs, and lots of snow and mountains. Somehow, I need to solve the puzzle.

So let’s start with the first piece: What is actually wrong with the car? And with scant resources on the ground, I’m left to guess based on the descriptions from my friend and from the car’s seller. Both describe a car that runs and drives perfectly in the first four gears, but doesn’t have fifth or sixth.

That immediately made me skeptical–normally I’d chase a linkage issue or a failing mount in this scenario, but I have to assume the dealer would have ruled out those easy answers.

Then I stumbled on a random forum post talking about 981 Caymans losing fifth and sixth gear–jackpot! The culprit, supposedly, is the retaining pin for the fifth and sixth gear shift fork. It can apparently fall out, leaving the fork floating on the shaft and causing the car to drive fine, but unable to engage fifth or sixth gear.

Is that what’s wrong with my Cayman? Who knows, but it was a decent assumption. So I began gaming out what fixing this issue would take: I’d need to rebuild the transmission.

No big deal, right? Well, not quite–according to Porsche this transmission contains no serviceable parts, and is instead replaced as an assembly. No diagrams or internal parts exist, or at least no diagrams or internal parts are available to mere mortals like me.

Why not install a used transmission? That would solve the problem, and I found plenty in the Seattle area for about $2500. But it would be a shame to replace a known good transmission with an unknown, especially if the only thing wrong with the car’s transmission is one missing pin.

What about shipping the car home? I ruled that answer out almost immediately, for a few reasons. First, no story–and that’s why we do these stupid projects, right?

And second, my wife has never driven cross-country before. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to see the sights and show her what a dumb car adventure is like, all from the comfort of our new Porsche.

So the way I see it, these are my options:

1. Have the car delivered to a local Porsche shop, where I’d spend thousands of dollars to have the transmission fixed or replaced.
2. Drive the car home in fourth gear, hoping the loose parts wouldn’t find their way into anything too important on the way.
3. Fix the car in my friend’s basic garage, then drive home in a functional car.

If you’ve read GRM before, you can probably see where this is going. My wife and I booked tickets for June–right after the snow melts, in theory–and are planning to fix the car and drive it home. We’ve budgeted a week in Seattle to deal with the transmission. Plenty of time, right?

So that leaves me three months to get my ducks in a row: I need to beg, borrow or steal some diagrams showing what the transmission internals are supposed to look like.

I need to put a toolkit together to accomplish the job.

And I need to find a used transmission to keep in reserve just in case rebuilding mine in the basement doesn’t work. By the end of this adventure, I’ll either have a nice Cayman for the price of a used Camry, or I’ll end up wasting $15,000 on an unfixable car in an unreachable location.

Have advice? Access to secret transmission blueprints? Bets on whether or not we’ll make it? Leave it all in the comments below, and check back in a few weeks for another update on my progress.

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