A bit of a cautionary tale for those of you thinking of dipping your toes into the water of affordable Porsches. I have been looking for a Cabriolet (or Boxster) and this one came up near me recently.
2002 Porsche 911 Carerra 4
From the listing, it looks good as the owner touts, "I've had new IMS bearing upgrade, clutch, and flywheel update. New brakes and rotors on all wheels." That checks off a lot of things on the evaluation list.
So, I went about my normal routine investigating the build and history on the car.
- I ran the VIN through the online decoder and saw that the car has a nice list of options. WP0CA29942S653347 Porsche 996 / 911 C4 convertible 2002
- Next I ran the VIN through https://www.vehiclehistory.com The results here caused some concern.
- Then, I added the car to my Garage on https://www.mycarfax.com/ This allows me to see some, but not all, of the maintenance history on the vehicle.
The above may seem a bit much. But, it only takes a couple of minutes to visit 3 sites and paste in the VIN to get a report from each and they are free. It helps me weed out some of the dubious cars from my search. When searching in the used 996/997 and 986/987 markets, you will come across a lot of knuckleheads. I prefer to not encounter them unnecessarily. Once I find a car I want to take the next steps on I contact the seller, ask some questions, go see the car, then if it gets that far have a PPI done.
Now, back to this C4 Cab. Vehicle History showed that the car was purchased at a "Buy Here, Pay Here" dealer in February then registered by the current owner in CT. This brought out the yellow caution flag as this would make me suspect that there is no real service history for the car. Also, I don't know what the guy paid when he bought it, but the report shows that the used car dealer had it listed for about $1,000 more than the current asking price. It appears that the seller may just be trying to get his money out of it.
Next, the maintenance report from MyCarfax only showed one entry for the time that the current owner has had the car. It is for a local quick oil change place. Now, I realize that all maintenance does not show up on these reports. But, service at a quick oil change joint brought out a full-course caution.
At this point, I was curious. How could someone that stated in their ad that "I've had new IMS bearing upgrade, clutch, and flywheel update. New brakes and rotors on all wheels" trust their car to the lube goons. I needed to find out more, so I sent an email to the seller complementing him on having the all of the above maintenance done and asked if he had the full service history. The response I received was, "First of all I should let you know that my boss is selling the car, I'm just listing it and addressing questions.He doesn't have the service records for it, he purchased it with all of that done from an independent dealer, along with a lot of other work as well. He purchased it around 2 or 3 months ago." Hmmm...I am sure that the work was done to perfection by drive-by dealer. The black flag came out and this car was dropped from the race.