Porsche 928 for Bro

Was a true unappreciated super car BUT you need very deep pockets to maintain it.  There are a few "S" models with 5 spd trans.  I'd prefer a 944 converted to V8 power.

http://jalopnik.com/how-sidewa...rsche-928-1452193198

http://jalopnik.com/265926/porsche-928

Marty,

My brother has always been 928 fanatic (Risky Business Syndrome) but every time he owns one he hates it, never drives it, and sells it six months later. Some are very nice and there are many people who love theirs but I would never buy one that was not meticulously maintained. It's amazing how dismally maintained most of these have been and with such a needy car that only spells trouble. My brother eventually got himself into a 944S2 and he cannot get enough of it. It has the same performance as the turbo without all of the problems, easy to maintain, and costs a fraction of a what a well maintained 928 would. One tradeoff might be that if your brother wants an automatic he will have a much easier time finding that option on a 928. Some of the well kept 928s are $13-$18K and at that point you may as well save an extra year and get yourself into a 911 SC or Carrera.

-Just my pair of pesos

Marty:

A few (well, two) of my friends have had them in the past.  One guy did most of the work on the car himself and I credit him as being about as mechanically inclined as me.  His biggest outlay was for parts and even that was a lot of bucks for two reasons:  1.) lots of stuff was corroded and had to be replaced, including all of the wiring harnesses (there are  like 12 different ones - 4 behind the dash alone) and the main computer (which sits under the passenger seat and tends to get damp and corrode).  Those were all BIG bucks items.  

2.) The 928 was a purpose-designed, single model car which was WAY over-designed and has a ton of unique parts, all of them exclusive to Porsche, which automatically gets you into the 10X price club (meaning whatever the part, it costs 10X what it should).

The other guy hit the lottery on a start-up and didn't care what things cost.  He was anything BUT a mechanic.  He bought his great-looking 928S (white - Louis Vuitton edition - looked like a ghost in the dark) for about $21K and took it to some premier 928 guy in Connecticut and simply said; "Make it new again".  

After 18 months and about $60K more he got it back, just like new.  It was awesome.........for about 3 months until cold weather hit.  Then those wiring harnesses started messing up on him.  He fought that for 6 more months, dumping more money into it and eventually sold it on Hemmings for about $35K (his best offer) and bought a 350Z.

But those three months when it was running right?  Friggin awesome!

So that works out to about $15k /month for three months of Friggin' awesome.  

Check in with Cory Hoopty Pilot...he's owned a couple of those! 

Thanks

Marty.

I have the solution.  Just show him this picture.  In my opinion, pretty much the ugliest Porsche ever made!

Troy--you nailed it----sorta looks like the AMC in Wayne's World!

How much do you like your brother? 

I'm with Gordon on this. They are nice until you have to work on them!

Run, run fast!

All the expense of owning a Porsche, without the Cachet.

But no flames, Jack.  Not the same without them.  

I had this exact conversation with a few PCA buddies just last week when one joked about "restoring" one of his old 928s.  The general consensus was that the only 928s currently worth owning were the last few years of production GTS, or very low mile/well cared for early 90s S4s... and those have held some pretty good value... thus, for the money, go 911.

He is 50 next year so I guess I'll advise him to get a Prostate exam and skip the 928 for now.

928, roughly speaking: 3200 pounds, 5 liter v8, 317 ft-lbs torque. 0-60 in  6 seconds, top speed of 165 and a .87 on the skid pad.

C4 Corvette (1988): 3200 lbs, 5.7 liter v8, 340 ft-lbs torque, 0-60 in 5.6 seconds, top speed 156 mph and .87 on the skid pad. 

The 928 costs $6,000 to $20,000. Apparently it's quite a lot more after you buy it. And no respect from whoever you're supposed to get respect from by having a Porsche.

And the old Vette? $5-$10k, all done. Chevy parts if you need any. And best of all, it's fiberglass!

I'm really late to this party.

Marty, hopefully you've steered him away by now. If he's insistent, take him to a "Shark Frenzy" with the PCA -- and he'll have a lot of questions to ask. They're about $500.00 a month to maintain nowadays, and that's just the routine bit.

Porsche has absolutely nothing to do with them anymore, and they won't sanction a whole lot of aftermarket care, either. Porsche mechanics will have to use remanufactured stuff (water pump, radiator, all those goddamned relays and wired circuits the engineers installed under the wooden passenger's side floorboard, the gold-infused windows and your car's choice of three possible alternators which aren't interchangeable ... all that now at a premium) -- plus the added joy of painting aluminum front fenders, hood and doors, whilst matching the same paint to the steel rear quarters and the rubberized nose and tail.

It's potentially very painful. Tweeks is mostly not reliable, and the dismantlers know what they have and who's going to buy it. The coin you'll drop to operate the 928 is going to be enough to curb the car in hopes of preserving it, and that, in turn, will be terrible for the very thing you're trying to save.

If you can get into a 928 from the later years, great. Do so. Buy the very best one you can afford. I had an '80 and an '81, an automatic and a manual, and I utterly destroyed the '80. The largest section of surviving bodywork is hanging on the wall in the garage -- but I walked away from a wreck which would have killed me in just about anything else. The engine was running, and the un-driveable carnage still shifted gears. A tank.

The second car was sold for a serious loss after I had surgery on my left foot. I'm kind of glad, looking back ... but it was an absolute gas to have the two I did in that period of my life.

The flip side, after all of that, is that I have never driven anything like a 928 -- before or since. It wasn't about zero-to-sixty. It was about feeling like you've really got something; the V-8 in front of you never missing a beat, the rear end never breaking loose and the squat stance of the car oozing that it was an extension of your recumbent driving position. You didn't get in, you fell in. You didn't click the seat belt, you strapped the car on like a running shoe. And you had every control at your fingertips, intuitively. Right where you'd want them. The gauges were never obtrusive, and moved with the tilt and telescope functions of the steering wheel.

Nobody could possibly have more of a supercar than me. That was the feeling. It had all the guts, all of the handling, of anything I could imagine driving. It was smart, it was agile, it was fast, and it cut traffic like a laser-guided missile.

When they work, meaning if the budget isn't an issue and there's a nearby mechanic who's a 928 enthusiast, great. Go for it. Otherwise, that bliss comes at a premium. If I had it to do over again, I'd walk away.

Cory,

The next time Car and Driver needs a writer, I suggest you apply.  You seem to have a gift.  This was pleasurable reading.

Cory-

I had a car like that: it was a BMW E39 540i (V8) 6 sp manual. It wasn't an M, although it was about 9/10ths of the way there. It was the "grown up" version of the 928.

Owning that car was like having a German body-builder as your best friend. It was always up for some fun, nobody messed with it, and it felt cool to be the alpha-dog in every situation. The car was always there to make me feel good... unless it was trying to steal my wife or kill me while "playing around". It had a voracious appetite for expensive fluids and parts. The water cooled alternator was expensive like shards of the true cross-- $1500 sticks in my mind. It alternated between intoxicating me with speed and leaving my wife stranded in bad neighborhoods. The seats were amazing. I went through something like 3 ECUs. It was crazy-strong, crazy-fun, crazy-expensive, and in the end: crazy-unreliable.

I sold the car for pennies on the dollar. I wish I still had the seats.

"Water-cooled alternator??!" Reminds me of an engineering class at UConn I watched (didn't take, watched) in the early '80s. Teams to build a specified machine, in this case a device to carry a payload while tunneling straight up though an "infinite medium" of foam packing peanuts. The obvious solution was a battery-powered auger.

One team just had to use a chainsaw motor. Built this thresher-looking device with rollers and tines. The engine rpm necessitated fabrication of an intricate brass gearbox with something like a 550-to-1 reduction. Given the exhaust heat, and the fact that styrene makes poison gas when it burns, they had to adapt some kind of dry-ice cooling system. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of a new Pentagon contractor.

Little did I know those lads would end up at BMW, cooking up new solutions to non-problems.

A short little addendum to this: yesterday, I took a 16-year-old kid out in the Hoopty to look at an '87 944S. There were a few over 5,000 944S models imported in '88, but this is clearly a year earlier, European car that was brought over in the early stages of introduction to the US. How it got here is anybody's guess.

Nonetheless, this kid is in the BEST (engineering) pipeline, and that's what he wants for his first car. His grandfather is a fire chief I've known and respected for a long time -- the man who gave Jeni and I our 1950 fire engine, in fact, and the kid's a better-than-A-average student with a knack for mechanical things. He narrowed the field from 40 potential candidates to five, and his grandfather asked me to help him evaluate those cars.

Even showing him the 944's updates, notices and bulletins did not scare him away from wanting a 16-valve car. So off we went. It reminded me very much of me (when I was young and stupid, as opposed to now -- when I'm older and maybe not QUITE as dumb about things).

The black car we looked at lived in a race trailer, was plugged in, tendered and had a million spare parts and black upholstery pieces hanging neatly on body-work painting hooks overhead from the roof of the trailer, not unlike bats in a cave. Window regulating arms, sunroof seals, instrument pods, a heater core, hoses, glove boxes, cylinder heads ... all kinds of stuff.

To me, now, that would have been a warning that I'd have to be in the parts-collection and accumulation stockpiling business and always on the lookout for parts that are NLA. To him, that was several thousand dollars of opportune spares -- all of which would convey with the 90-percent car for $7,000. And that car will never, in a million years -- stored in cryostasis -- be worth more than $10,000. Ever.

Cosmetically, the car is a six. Maybe a six-and-a-half. To him, that wasn't what was important. Apparently, and according to the three-inch binder full of documentation, this car's engine was re-done about 6,000 miles ago. So was the gearbox, the brakes, the suspension, the interior and the rubber bits. All of it. And the tensioners, the blah, blah, blah.

He's one day past his 16th birthday. He has exactly $7,000 to spend. And he's going to do it. Without passing judgement on the kid for his eagerness to own something that'll drive him into the poorhouse the first time he hits a wall on making the car run well, I took him instead to the shop that's un-f***ing the transaxle on my old 914. I asked the man doing the work what the current bill was for the 914's new owner, and if he'd let the young lad in on the shop's labor rate.

The kid turned white.

And when we got back to his parents' house, you know what his first words were to his mother?

"Mom, I need to get a part-time job. I need to call our insurance company, get a quote on what it would cost me to pay for that car in six-month and one-year terms, then I need to start cleaning out the old stuff from the garage. I'm in love."

She said, "At least it's not a GIRL."

A girlfriend or an old 944....either way he's very likely to get his heart broken.

I had a regular 944 NA.  It was a pretty cool car and fun but Porsche parts are Porsche parts and they don't give'm away.  That car, if I remember correctly, had the whole belt issue with the $500 tensioner tool and such.  I really wasn't that impressed with the car and thought my 325 handled a lot better and was more fun to drive despite the 944s purported almost perfect weight balance front to rear.  I would avoid the car as a first car.  If the car is $7,000 and all he has is $7,000 then tell him it's like going to the movies:  don't just go with enough money for the tickets when you know you're gonna want popcorn and soda.  Then again, sometimes we have to get these things out of our systems.