Hoping for some perspective from people who know these cars far better than I do. I'll keep names and locations out of it, but I'm happy to share more detail privately with anyone willing to help.
Car: 2010
997.2
Turbo,
PDK
, ~71,500 km. I've owned it about two years and it has been flawless — no warning lights, no boost issues, nothing. It's my first car and I look after it obsessively.
I took it to an official
Porsche
centre for a major scheduled service at ~71,500 km. Per the service record, the work included
spark plugs
, belts off and refitted, battery replacement,
PDK
service with oil sump replacement, an underbody treatment, and a long diagnostic session — which flagged no turbo or boost faults at all.
On the very first proper drive after the service (a longer motorway trip), problems started appearing. Over roughly the
next
few hundred km, in approximately this order:
a light/"dead" zone on-centre in the steering at motorway speed
a rear-right cabin noise on smooth tarmac
noticeably more liquid from the exhaust and much blacker tips
a different cold-start sound
a mechanical noise from underneath, then a metallic resonance around 3,000 rpm and a low hum between roughly 2,000–3,000 rpm
and then, progressively, almost total loss of boost
The key oddity: through all of this,
no warning light and no dash error message.
Here's where it gets frustrating. Initially the centre's position was that none of this could be related to the service because they "hadn't worked in that area." But their own service record shows the work was concentrated exactly around there — belts off and refitted, PDK oil sump, the full underbody treatment, the battery. Only after I pushed did they actually run checks, and at that point they reported a
bent exhaust heat shield
(which they straightened), a wheel rebalance, and then attributed the boost loss to "turbines oxidised with age" and a faulty actuator.
When I pressed further, they shared the PIWIS fault codes — boost-regulator faults on
both banks
: P1084, P1086, P1087, P1089, P1165, P1168, P1256, P0299. They found oil residue on one turbo only. For what it's worth, one of the two turbos was replaced under a previous owner less than four years and under 17,000 km ago.
Throughout, the responses have been slow — sometimes more than ten days between replies — which has made an already stressful situation harder.
What I'd love the community's read on:
Do boost-regulator/actuator codes across
both banks
, appearing together like this, point more toward genuine turbo wear, or toward something on the control/electrical/vacuum side that could be disturbed during work in that area?
Is it plausible for boost to collapse like this with
no dash warning at all
?
Does a
bent
heat shield in that area suggest something was contacted or disturbed underneath during service?
If you were diagnosing this from scratch, what would you want checked first — before anyone starts taking the exhaust and turbos apart?
Has anyone seen a similar cluster of symptoms appear right after a major service?
I'm not here to bash anyone — I genuinely want to understand what's most likely going on so I can make a sensible decision before authorising any irreversible teardown. If anyone with real experience on these cars is willing to go deeper, I'd be very grateful to continue by private message and share more detail, including documentation.
Thanks in advance — this car means a lot to me and I want to get it right.
Thank you
Orlando
Hey
@9972888
, that sounds like a really frustrating experience, especially for the issues to pop up right after the major service when the car was previously flawless. It's certainly suspicious that you're suddenly getting boost regulator faults on both banks at the same time.
Before going down the road of a full teardown, have you had a chance to inspect all the vacuum lines and electrical connectors around the top of the engine and turbos? Sharing a bit more about what you find there might help the community point you in the right direction.
Thanks again to everyone who's weighed in — . Quick update on where things stand, and then a question.
The centre has now sent a fuller report. To their credit, they've done real diagnostic work this time: they checked the intercooler hose seals, the VTG actuator linkages (and say both actuators move with the engine running, with connections and power OK), the bypass valves, the
Pierburg
valve, the air box and pressure sensor, and all the charge-air clamps. Turbine axial play they report as OK — but they found oil in the tubing on the left turbine only. They've sent photos, videos, and the freeze-frame data for P0299.
A few things from that data worth flagging:
P0299 was
active
, at 5,337 rpm and 205 km/h at full throttle — i.e. the fault occurred at speed under load, consistent with when it first showed up on me, not from any abuse.
Check Engine light: off
— so a real, live boost fault with no dash warning, now confirmed by their own readout.
Mass airflow reading 0.00 g/s
in that snapshot, which seems implausible at that speed/throttle.
They could
not complete the actuator adaptation via PIWIS
, and the boost-regulator adaptation values (P100–P103) all read
0.0 mbar
.
Their proposed next step is still to disassemble the exhaust and turbos (authorisation first, quote after).
They're firm that none of this is related to the service. They also now describe the bent heat shield as "completely irrelevant," and say the wiring near it showed no damage.
Here's where I've landed on my side of it, and I'd welcome push-back:
I'm not claiming I can prove they broke the turbo — I can't, and I won't pretend otherwise. But two things are simply true: the car went in running perfectly and developed all of this on the very first drive out; and their own work left a heat shield bent in the exact area they were working. To me that's proof the service wasn't carried out 100% to the book. I'm not asking the community to convict anyone — I'm trying to be honest about what's provable (careless work + timing) versus what's just my suspicion (that something they disturbed set off the chain).
And that's my question for you all:
has anyone here had a case where a shop disturbed
one
thing during a job and it caused a problem somewhere
else
— not the obvious part they touched, but a downstream effect? A vacuum line, a connector, a clamp, an oil weep, something that wasn't reseated and only showed up as a symptom elsewhere? I keep coming back to the idea that on these engines everything is interconnected, and a small thing left undone in one spot can surface as a bigger symptom in another. I'd like to know if that's a real pattern others have lived through, or if I'm reaching.
Plan from here: get the car collected on a flatbed (not driven), take it to an independent specialist with PIWIS, and start with the cheap reversible checks — actuator rods connected and moving freely, connectors, vacuum lines, a proper leak check — before anyone removes a single turbo. Will report back.
Thanks, all. This thread has kept me sane.
I think your plan is solid. IF the shop is denying they could possibly have caused the issue it would be really hard for you to get them to admit (and pay for) it. If they are hemming and hawing - then you might have a chance if you escalate it through the dealer chain of command (Service manager, then general manager, then owner..) pointing out how you've been a loyal customer willing to pay their premium price but you expect premium work for that, and the bent heat shield is evidence that isn't what happened.
Or - have the independent fix and document really carefully what he did to fix it. Take that to the dealership and if it indicates it was caused by shoddy workmanship - take it through the same chain of command until they make you happy (probably giving you free/discounted future service..)
Hang in there! And good luck! Please do come back when it's resolved and tell us how it was resolved.
