A place as big as St Louis has to have some decent independents. You may want to look up your local PCA chapter and ask who they'd suggest. The parts were ~$1400, and labor was around $1150 - both plus NJ tax.

The parts needed are new valve cover gaskets, some one-time use screws, and the Variocam adjusters, which list for around $700, but my dealer sold them to me for around $550/each (and there were multiple dealers on line who would sell them for the same amount.) WC-22, which is somewhere in this thread, gives the parts list, making it really easy for you to shop it around.

I think you might ask the dealership for a written estimate, including parts. My dealer was happy to provide it to me before we agreed on them doing the job. Once I saw it was reasonable - I told them to get the parts.

There is a "kit" from Porsche for the cars where the VIN# is included in WC-22, but Porsche Cars NA will not sell that to the dealer if your VIN# isn't in WC-22. So - my dealership just ordered up the parts individually, and had them in about 3 days. And there is NO difference in the parts used between a standard V8 and the turbo models. SAME parts. Identical part numbers. FWIW - mine is a turbo.

 

As requested, I submitted the issue online. Good luck, everyone!

 

Thanks! You're doing everyone a favor doing that. Now if NHTSA starts pushing the investigation, perhaps PCNA will awake to the idea that more bad publicity isn't a good thing and fix the things for us (or make whole those of us who paid to fix it themselves.)

 

add my 2012 CTT to the list...VIN : WP1AC2A22CLA80054 .
125K miles, dealer said aluminum bolts sheered, no engine damage, NO warranty or recall coverage.
quoted repair $3600.
Reading through the W 22 Tech sheet,,, estimated labor is 487 TU .... Can someone explain what that means? ,,, hoping to negotiate better labor time from Porsche

These trucks have terrible build quality imo,,, in the last year i have spent well over 10k in repairs ...Rear differential , transfer case, window motor, wiper motor, air shock replaced, ridiculous tire wear...

 

FYI for those of you here in the Los Angeles county area my local indy Ian Hanson at Ingolstadt West will replace the 2 camshaft adjusters for $2320.56 plus tax but he is negotiable as well if you pay him cash.

 

Sorry to hear of your issue Sybco. That really blows. Lucky your engine was not trashed and that no one was hurt!
Would you mind reporting it to the NHTSA? Maybe we can get some sort of recall going here.

You can call the NHTSA and they will collect the info from you at 1-888-327-4236 or you can fill out a form online at https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/VehicleComplaint/

 

Steve (Sybco) has been in touch with me. For people who didn't bother looking up his VIN# - that's the 54th Cayenne built for the 2012 model year, so it's an early one. According to one site I looked at - it was built in June 2011. So - chances are there are a goodly number of 2012 models with the aluminum bolts.

Steve is reporting it to NHTSA/DOT - which can only help put pressure on Porsche to do the right thing.

To me it appears his dealer is about $1,000 high on their price. Mine was $2,600 including all parts to do the WC-22 campaign at my expense. The price might creep up to around $3,000 or so if the dealer charges full retail for the parts. Mine was willing to match (without any question actually) the best parts prices I could find on the web from Porsche dealers.

Unfortunately - with 125,000 miles on it - Porsche Cars NA isn't going to do a thing to assist in the repairs.

 

That's a great price. Parts (discounted) run about $1,500 (lots of one-time use aluminum bolts holding things together, and gaskets/seals/etc, plus the adjusters which retail for around $650/each.)

I'm guessing he isn't charging Porsche hourly rates..

 

Some info to chew on...
manf = manufacture date
Failure = approx month of failure
Days to Fail = Failure date minus Manf date

Manf, Failure, Days to Fail
6/1/2010, 9/1/2016, 2284
9/1/2010, 2/1/2016, 1979
10/1/2010, 3/1/2016, 1978
11/1/2010, 11/1/2016, 2192
11/1/2010, 11/1/2016, 2192
5/1/2011, 6/1/2016, 1858
5/1/2011, 7/1/2016, 1888
6/1/2011, 2/1/2017, 2072


There definitely seems to be some grouping (to my eyes) of the data, by manufacture date. In other words, it seems that cars that are manufactured in the same month seem to fail at about the same time. Strangely it seems to be independent of the Mileage on the cars. Not really enough data to come to real conclusions.

For the Days to failure:
Mean 2055
Median 2026
Stddev 155
Max 2284
Min 1858

Also 80K miles seems to be the break point for if Porsche will (or will not) cover the expenses of the repair.

 

This situation is very frustrating as this failure is exactly the same failure that BMW had and in fact the same company made the BMW part that is failing in the Cayennes.

Any ideas on how to get Porsche to do something about this out there?

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/201...V176-8618P.pdf


Supplier_(V~~QS_assemhly).
Hilite Germany GmbH
Am SchloBfeld 5
D-97828 Marktheidenfeld
Germany
Tel.: +49-9391-911-0
Country of Origin - Germany
Sub-supplier.(aluminum bolts)
RIBE-Richard Bergner Verbindungstechnik GmbH & Co. KG
BahnhofsstraBe 8-16
D-91126 Schwabach
Tel.: 49-9122-870-0

 

It not only was the same company - the adjusters for both companies came from them around the same time, and failed identically. It's obviously a flawed design.

As far as getting Porsche's attention - DOT/NHTSA is one path. I suspect the same failures have occurred in Europe - but this forum doesn't have a lot of euro members (probably because it's in English..) TUV comes to mind for Europe.

The other way to get their attention is a class-action lawsuit. If you go back in this thread you'll find a few posts by an attorney who put together a webpage with some of the basic facts from this thread in it. At the time he did this I suspect there weren't enough failures to make it financially attractive to an attorney to start a class-action. As the count continues growing that might well change.

 

The numbers are interesting - but - something else has to be considered. IF there was a failure while the vehicle was under the original factory warranty, I suspect the chance of us hearing about it would be much less.

Most (not all - but I would guess a majority) of members here probably have vehicles that are out of the original factory warranty period. The people under warranty have less incentive to search on the web about the failure, and indeed might be told by a dealer that its an unusual failure - and think nothing more of it since Porsche paid to fix it.

Just food for thought - I do know I've seen reports of low mileage vehicles failing (particularly on Panamera's). Of course these low mileage ones might still fall under the approximate 5 year time span between manufacturing and failure.

Oh - why would it be time not mileage related? Possibility if the bolt is overstressed that it simply takes that much time for the failure to propagate to the point that the bolt head pops off. As long as the bolt isn't loose - I don't think mileage will have a lot of effect on the bolt failure given the failure mode usually seen (head popping off.)

 

The thing is, the BMW recall really should have been looked at from a broader perspective. Once they realized that the problem was bad bolts from a certain manufacturer, the recall should have covered ALL car makes that contained the flawed bolts (BMW, Porsche and ?). Limiting the recall to just BMW is borderline criminal. Someone could easily die as a result of this issue.

Also, BMW had only 12 incidents of failure, a number that is much lower than the number Porsche has from what I can tell. We have documented 17 failures of Cayennes that are not covered by a Porsche recall on this site.

"BMW said in its report to NHTSA that it received 12 warranty claims related to problems involving its variable camshaft timing adjustment unit, which the bolt defect primarily affects. The unit, which BMW refers to as a VANOS unit, helps improve the engine's fuel efficiency, among other things, according to BMW.

The VANOS unit is assembled with four aluminum bolts that have a "quality fault" that makes them loosen over time, and causes the bolt heads to break, according to BMW's report to NHTSA."

 

I don't think that's entirely accurate when it comes to Porsche. I think there were two failure modes with the Porsche VarioCam adjusters.

I think the initial failures - and some of them were rather early in the life of the vehicles - were bolts backing out. Once they back out enough, the force required to turn the camshaft is enough to sheer them off. I've seen a number of pics with bolts that were mostly intact, but laying in the cam gallery, obviously backed out. These are the VIN#'s that I think Porsche covered in WC-22.

I think then the company that made them started using red Loctite on the bolts to make sure they'd never ever come out. That worked fine - they stopped backing out, and now last a certain amount of time until the forces on the head of the bolt cause it to sheer off. If you look at the bolt design, it has a deep Torx recess in it - the depth of it goes almost to the start of the actual bolt shaft. On a steel bolt that would likely be strong enough for the application - not so with the aluminum bolts. I think those are the failures we're now seeing.

I tried removing one of the bolts from one of my old adjusters - and there was no way it was coming out without the heavy application of heat - and heat would destroy the seals in the adjusters.

If you notice BMW originally installed a bolt-kit to fix the adjusters. Porsche never went that route - they replace the entire adjuster. That's significant to me. They were convinced by the manufacturer that the new adjuster with the bolts Loctited in place was going to fix the problem, and it probably did for a while - and now as they age the problem is rearing it's ugly head again.

Old engineer thinking here..

 

I priced the parts thru Sunset...$525 per housing. I have requested the old parts from Porsche service. If the serial code matches the faulty batch I will present this to Porsche along with the WC 22 TECH Campaign which clearly states the defective part number. Service manager attempted good will from PNA, but was denied. He has agreed to negotiate pricing in the end.
I have reported this to the NTHSB (sp?).
Appreciate all who have contributed to this thread!
This Cayenne is making me fall back in love with my 993...Now that represents build quality!
-Scott