Mike BickellSussex, UK
Model 996 CARRERA 4SYear 2002Acquired MARCH 2015
While it’s been a busy year attending Porsche events and road tripping around Europe, the 996 has been inactive, which the electrics have taken umbrage to.
Slowly but surely small things have been intermittently failing, which I generally forget about until the next outing. What started as a niggle with the seats has become a shopping list waiting for the next service First to become recalcitrant were the aforementioned seat adjustments. The coincidence that both seat switches intermittently fail simultaneously is unlikely and as the prices for switch sets are astronomical, a fishing expedition to replace both isn’t an option I wish to explore just yet. I suspect the problem is upstream of both switches, requiring a bit of tracing back using the electrical diagrams I have handy.
The next item to malfunction was the sunroof, which moves, tilts and slides in a way unrelated to the buttons being pressed. This reared its head after the battery failed on the 9WERKS Norway trip and required replacing in Oslo while the convoy of accompanying Porsche waited patiently. Allegedly, there’s a way to reset it, but six months on it’s still haphazard in operation.
Also having elicited from the Norway trip, as we opened the farm gates after driving 4,000 miles across northern Europe the airbag light has come on permanently. It could be the seatbelt receiver attached to the loom under the seat, so there may be a connection to that, and hopefully seat adjustment and airbag issues could be cleared up by cleaning the connectors under the driver’s seat that serve both items.
The final fault happened last weekend on a spirited drive to Croissants and Neuf with our friends Stuttgart South. An early morning blast down towards Horsham is part of my old commuter route: a mix of roundabout-punctured dual carriageways and a bit of B road for good measure. On one of the sections of dual carriageway the rear spoiler failed to deploy, producing a heart-stopping new warning light that wouldn’t go away. Not the kind of distraction you need when concentrating on not hitting the rev limiter, even on a deserted Sunday morning. There are a whole host of warning lights that could have lit under those conditions with a far more adverse outcome. It went away once the car was stopped and hasn’t appeared since, but has been added to the list nonetheless. It was great seeing Ed and his 40th Anniversary 996 from the 9WERKS road trip to the Stuttgart Porsche Museum.
The last and newest irritation has been that both keyfobs have stopped working, requiring the key to be used. There’s a knack to this and a 50-50 chance that the alarm goes off if you knack it wrong. New batteries, cleaning contacts and anointing it with oil from the Black Forest has failed roundly to fix either keyfob and it looks like whatever’s wrong is beyond my fettling.
Having partaken vigorously in Editor Lee’s mid 9WERKS Road Trip keep-fit regime he covered in issue 237’s column, getting the electronic quirks and features won’t be ignored. In fact, I’ve started putting together a small kit of useful roadside tools and equipment to ease the pain of unscheduled stops. First item is a solid towing bar followed closely by an enhanced OBD2 code reader. Next is a multimeter, spare coilpack and a selection of other useful ‘things’ in a fashion to make my grandfather proud.
Compared to the other cars in my menagerie, the Porsches are pretty exemplar in their behaviour, but now and then even the best-maintained 911 has potential for a hiccup. Except for the battery, which was pretty easy to replace, the C4S has behaved. The slow creep of intermittent faults aren’t mission critical, but is more an alert that
