If you’ve ever been in the market for a used car, then you know how the saying goes. Buy a gently used German car on the cheap, and you can expect to pay an arm and leg when the inevitable repair bills spring up. You may try to resist the temptation to lay your hands on some serious performance. But what would you do when you come across a 2012 Porsche Cayenne Turbo for $22,000 — less than one-fifth of its original price? With its twin-turbocharged 4.8-liter V8 engine that chucks out 500 horsepower and 516 lb-ft of torque, that low price is an appealing performance bargain.
So what happens when you take that performance bargain SUV to a track and put it in the hands of a professional racing driver? Of course it breaks, as we pitched the V8-powered Porsche against the electric Tesla Model X, shown above.
Fixing the Porsche costs how much!?
After a smoky finish to Paul’s hot lap around the IMI Motorsports track, this seven-year-old Porsche Cayenne Turbo had a serious fault with its hydraulic sway bar control system, called PDCC. At least it’s engine is still pretty solid (apart from a tiny oil leak), but we knew dealing with this fault wasn’t going to come cheap.
After the TFLcar video above, we took the Porsche to a local dealership in the Denver area, and waited for the damage figures to roll in. Indeed, if you maintain your Porsche through your dealership, most repairs are going to total in the thousands of dollars. Tally up the cost to reseal the oil pan to stop the small leak, their estimate to repair the PDCC system and even just the $219 diagnostic cost, and the total cost shot over $7,000. On a $22,000, sinking more than a quarter of the purchase price into repairs after just a few months of ownership was out of the question.
But here’s the rub: Do you have to repair your Porsche through the dealership. Of course you don’t, so how much less expensive is it to go through a local, non-franchised mechanic instead? To find out, we actually had the Porsche repaired through a shop called German Auto in Boulder, Colorado. The issue wasn’t as extensive as we originally thought, and was cheaper to repair than you might think. Find out more about how much it actually costs in the video below!
Ultimately, our plan is to turn this Porsche Cayenne into a true overlander, akin to the manufacturer’s Transsyberia limited model. Stay tuned to TFLcar.com for more updates on that project!
