[jwetering]

The Pelican 996 board isn't particularly active unfortunately. This is where the aircooled guys hang out. You'll find what you're looking for over at Rennlist.com.

In a nutshell though, the 996 are solid well built Porsches. Electronics are not a big problem at all, unlike some other German cars. Brakes, suspension, clutches, nd teh six speed gearboxes are all good, great even, the mechanical bits are all typical Porsche stuff which has been developed and evolved over the years. Certainly the rear spoiler is nothing to think about, much less worry about.

The 996 series cars do have a fatal flaw though, and that is the engines. With the introduction of the 996 and 986 (Boxsters) came a brand new engine design for Porsche. This was a water cooled flat six and it was totally unlike the air cooled flat sixes that came before. The engine is known as the M96, and in 2009 Porsche finally replaced it with their next generation motor which designation I can't recall at the moment.

A lot of the early M96 motors suffered from bad castings which weeped oil, all generations of M96 motor were susceptible to catastrophic intermediate shaft failures. Some early cars also failed due to the cylinder wall failing. Articles, book, websites have been dedicated to the M96 motors and their various isues so I won't go into a lot of detail here.

That's all the bad news. The good news is that most of the motors are fine and as they get older we are seeing M96 motors making well in excess of 100,000 miles. The motors are lively, make great power, they're light and are easy to service.

I've just bought y second 996 because I like and trust them more than the air cooled cars. The cars are easy to drive, they'll basically drive circles around the older cars, they look good. They're a nice modern 911.

So...buy carefully and you will not be disappointed. That's not to say that owning a 996 will be cheap....you've still got to maintain the cars (they eat rear tires at a rate of 1 set per season) but they're no better or worse than any other high performance car in this respect.

If you have more questions (and you should have) I'd recommend heading over to Rennlist.com.

Cheers