Consumer Reports: FULL test - 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera S

Here is the whole test. Notice that on "PREDICTED" reliability, they say, "We 'expected' the car to have the worst reliability due to our 'subscriber' survey." ----- C'mon now, we all know that a CR survey on "PREDICTED" reliability, on a 2006 911 is hardly and indicator of the real-world, long term reliability!!! Overall, the 911 has the NUMBER 1 Overall Test Score in the Ultra Performance/Luxury Sports Cars test. W3rd to ya motha's!

So what does the 'subscriber survey' state?

Who the hell knows. All I know is that it seems a bit premature to for CR's to say, according to some survey, we EXPECT the car to have poor reliability. I EXPECT their "survey" to be WRONG!

It is the basis of the responses on the various reliability points. CU sends surveys to some of its subscribers. CU asks you to respond. The surveys are inherently flawed becasue they only go to CU subscribers, although I kind of doubt that affects the high end cars scores too much. A few responses with problems will result in a bad rating. Frankly, Porsche earned this bad rating with the RMS problem alone. Add the few transmission problems, and lesser problems which are simply not an issue anymore on Japanese cars, and you have a mess. Not unlike Mercedes and to a lesser extent BMW and Audi. Damn, it would be so much less expensive if I could get myself to drive a boring car! I have not heard of any exhaust problems, except that it is too quiet. I wonder why it was marked down there?

"It's six speed transmission is easy to shift and has close ratios for responsive performance. But it leaves the engine wailing busily at high rpm on the highway and contributes to a relatively high noise level." 3000 rpm at 80mph (for example) is wailing busily? Sure, it's not 1500 rpm like in a 400 ft-lb Vette, but 3k rpm in a 911 is definitely not "wailing busily".

I believe that I heard on Autline Detroit that they send surveys to 1.5 million subscribers and that they believe they have subscribers in all demographic groups. Hence, they have coverage across lots of car product lines and price points and vehicles. They claim it is the largest survey of its kind. Regards, Marc

I agree with Kevin about the 'wailing' engine. In sixth gear the Porsche is loafing along at 70 MPH. If CR wants to hear a wailing engine they should ride with ME! A guy from CR was on Autoline Detroit recently. Another journalist was grilling him on the validity of their surveys. The survey goes out to CR subscribers only (natch) and only the people who choose to reply are included in the results (natch). So the survey is nothing like a good statistical sampling of the entire population. That said, there are lots of little things wrong with a 996. You know, squeaks around the sunroof, goofy stereo, stuff like that. It doesn't mean much to me once we're rolling on the highways. But to your average (and I mean that literally) CR subscriber they might mean a lot more.

Most surveys are not accurate anyway. JD Powers recently scored Porsche with #1 in Quality. That's probably a sampling of only a very small number . But that was what we P owners like to hear, I didn't hear much dispute with their survey at the time. (We used to deal with JD Powers at work, and all they do is call up our customers, it could be from 6-9 people, and based on that, we get our overall customers satisfaction scores representing say a group of 500. Ridiculous to me! We have switched to another company now.)

It thought JD only surveyed the first few months of vehicle ownership?

the 02s got slammed in reliability...

They do an initial quality survey and one after three years. Porsche has done both very well and rather poorly in the three year survey depending on the year. Apparently, there were a lot of problems with the SUV which really hurt the brand reliability.

I especially like the Viper's reliability: NA -td