Porsche Boxster S Manual and Tiptronic 3200

I've had my Porsche Boxster S Manual and Tiptronic 3200 for 7 months now and have driven it for 5 of those months. It is second hand and it had done 49,000 on the clock. When I first bought my Boxster I was over the moon. It is a very sexy car and is a fantastic drive, especially in the summer, but beware of the expense. On my 5th month of owning the car, I noticed smoke coming from one of the vents and then noticed water gushing from an overflow pipe under the car. It has turned out to be a cracked cylinder head (thankfully it was only 1 cracked head and not more). It is going to cost me over £4,000 to fix. The Cylinder itself is only about £1,700 but when you replace a cylinder you also have to replace the Head Gaskit which starts making it very expensive. Oh and beware, most if not all, warranties don't pay out on cracked cylinders, so I'm having to find this extra money now which I didn't expect which would have cost even more if I had gone to Porsche directly. It is only now I have found out that many Porsche's have this problem and the garage has Porsche's coming in all the time with the same problem, although I'm told the models made in the last 2 years have put this right. If you have lots of money to spare then, yes, go ahead and buy a brand new Porsche but if you do not have so much to spare, try going for something a little more reliable. I'm now looking at Honda S2000. Bit of a downgrade but looks good and a lot less costly to fix problems. I have loved owning my Porsche for 5 months but these 2 past months arguing with the warranty has totally put me off. They finally agreed to help me with £250. Wow Wee!!!! I get the car back at the weekend and yes, I'm looking forward to driving it again, but I plan to sell it as soon as possible, although part of me still wants to keep it, but I will always be worrying when one of the other cylinders might crack.

I have been (and still am) the happy owner of two Porsche Boxster S's. The first one I bought was approximately 2 years ago. I opted for a 2000 model in black, manual, no navi. I loved it! However I soon missed the auto box that I had had in my old SLK. The gearbox was very stiff when cold, and the clutch was very hard. Wonderful on the back roads and the track, but no fun in town, and the town is where I drive the most... I decided to sell my "precious" and buy another Boxster S, also black but year 2002, with all extras and tiptronic, as well a sports suspension 3cm lower. I could immediately feel that the loss of a manual box meant loss of horse power, but the tiptronic is a very nice auto box. I however long for a sport mode, so that the box does not change up so fast, nice for cruising, but not very sporty. OK, I could just use the manual function where you decide which gear box to use, but still, it would be nice with "sport" mode. Furthermore, the PSM is a bit too overprotective. Here it would also be nice with a SPORT mode, and that would let you "play" a bit more with the car. I recently bought a sport exhaust system from www.977.de in Germany. A true Porsche tuning company, and after fitting it I could immediately feel the gain of HP, however one major drawback... It was too loud, and I am not fussy when it comes to the exhaust sound, but the whole interior of the cabin was shaking and I was going nuts, so I had to refit the old exhaust :(

To sum up, the Boxster is really a great car, but always go for the S, check the service book, and get ready to have tons of fun. This is a car you will love!