My Boxster, having 63,000 lushly-traveled miles on the odo, has finally been relegated to weekend duty. This past weekend I polished it up, put the top down and drove it all over town. The weather was perfect, engine song was melodious, and life was good. Not having driven the car in two weeks, I was amazed again at how perfect it felt. Life was good, a veritable angel's song, as I drove to dinner in the dusky Saturday-evening light.
<cue ominous thunder>
"Gee, where'd all the cars behind me go?" I glanced up at the mirror to catch something malevolently black vanishing from view. The cars are still there. "Gee, that's funny," I say with a mental shrug, as I look forward again and tap the Go Pedal.
<thunderheads, lighting>
I'm instantly being followed by a black cloud, thick as night. The top is down so it's blowing into the cabin too. "Hmm, I don't think it's supposed to do that."
The car is happy to glide off-throttle, so I take the next exit off the freeway and pull over as soon as it's safe. Any throttle application generates a smoke screen that looks like a stage effect. People are passing me and yelling, "you're smoking!" One person in a camper goes so far as to yell, "You're on fire, man!!" The engine light has turned on on the dash, exhaust is making crazy burbly, poppy sounds (much more than the usual from an aftermarket exhaust such as my AWE). Game Over, time to call the flat bed.
Anyhow, I got a call today around lunchtime from my dealership. The car was already fixed! The Oil Separator had "failed", leading to oil in the intake--hence the black clouds. I knew it had to be oil getting into the cylinders, I just wasn't sure how, and how severe the damage was. As usual, it ends up being some kind of evaporative emissions system problem.
Thankfully, the extended warranty covered the cost. After 63,000 miles and four years of daily driving, I've still only paid $900 for any maintenance or repair work (when the shift cable endlinks broke on the transmission-side about 10,000 miles ago). That's not to say that my car isn't a regular in the service yard though.......
Good news and tell us more about your extended warranty. From whom, how much, when purchased and stuff like that.
Oh, let met clarify that I'm not complaining (since this got moved to the Complaints forum), I just wanted to make sure that a search for "black smoke under throttle help!" returned a hit.
The extended warranty I have is actually a Porsche Certified Pre-Owned warranty, good for 100,000 miles (expiring, in my case, by 2012). It doesn't cover *everything*, for instance, it didn't cover my broken shift cable (which i thought wasn't too fair, but since it was the first bill I'd had to pay, I didn't whine too much), but it covers most of the major bits.
As to how I got the Porsche CPO warranty on a car that I bought brand new, that's a long story, related to me clawing my way up the Porsche Customer Care line about some issues I was dealing with back during the first 20,000 miles of ownership. Buying the first production year of a new model has some...drawbacks...
