A Tale Of Two Turbos

In the same way that Jaguar and Land Rover marketing becomes increasingly cod-Brit as their owner, Indian conglomerate Tata, assumes more and more control over their operations, Porsche has decided to celebrate their transition to a manufacturer of SUVs and luxury sedans by finally giving their dwindling enthusiast base the Cayman GT4 a scant decade after the arrival of the first Boxster-avec-roof. At $84,900 it’s even good value for money after a fashion, assuming you don’t mind being treated like a chicane on the racetrack by the $59,900 Corvette Z06 or a used C6 Corvette Z06 or a used C5 Corvette Z06 with decent tires.

I think that the GT4 might succeed beyond Porsche’s wildest expectations. There’s a lot of money out there that’s itching to be spent on a new Porsche with even a modest amount of enthusiast cred. Know how I know? Because that money is chasing used cars like hell won’t have it.

Two Turbos, each alike in dignity. Or maybe not. Wilhoit Enterprises, which is always at the forefront of the used-Porker market in both condition and pricing, has a couple of cars they’d like to sell you, both pictured above. They have the same mileage and condition. Here’s the 993 Twin Turbo, and here’s the 996 Twin Turbo X50 Powerkit. The latter is listed for $59,900, and it’s overpriced. The former is listed for $169,900, and it represents a chance to buy, hold, and make money.

Let me pause for a moment to say this: When I bought my 1995 993 Carrera thirteen years ago, I could have bought any number of cars just like the 993 Turbo above for $74,900 or less. I certainly had the money to do it, but I thought that the naturally-aspirated car was a smarter and saner purchase. Clearly, I’m an idiot. Not that I haven’t seen some value increase in my car, but it hasn’t been well over one hundred percent. Fifty percent, maybe.

Is the 993 worth 2.5x as much as the 996 X50? Empirically speaking, absolutely not. The 996TT doesn’t have the fragile M96 engine of the Deadly Sin #1 1999 996 Carrera. The front half of the drivetrain can be a little fragile, but that mostly comes into play if you take advantage of any of the kits out there that exploit the bulletproof nature of the split-case Turbo engine and boost your 996TT to 800 wheel horsepower or more, for $15-20k. The stereo is more troublesome than the one in the 993, but the climate control is much better. The interior’s pretty crappy, but the same is true of the 993.

In any kind of race, whether at a stoplight or around VIR, the newer car will absolutely slaughter the air-cooled one. It won’t even be close. The more you tune the two cars, the bigger the gap becomes. The 996 handles much better than the 993. It stops better, too. By pretty much all measures, it’s a superior automobile.

So why is it relatively worthless? Well, the Porsche market is stubborn, and stupid, and loyal to a fault — but once you burn them, they tend to stay burnt. It’s taken fifteen years for the PCA crowd to admit that the 996 and its successors have some genuine problems, but now that they’d admitted it, they’re all running scared back to the air-cooled cars. Porsche built just 68,029 993s of all types, and that includes 18,000 Cabrios that the market doesn’t want and an additional 11,000 hardtop AWD cars that the market doesn’t want as much as they want an AWD Turbo or RWD Coupe. There are perhaps 4,000 Turbos left in the world and an additional 20,000 Carreras, to serve a world that buys a million Rolexes a year. Also, keep in mind that Porsche sold 48,500 or so Cayennes just in 2013.

So you have a lot of disaffected Porsche owners returning to a very small number of air-cooled cars. They’re also returning to the 997 GT3, but in that case we’re simply seeing strong resale values firm up even more. If you buy a 997 GT3 today, you’ll be able to sell it for similar money ten years from now. The exception might be those run-out GT3 4.0s which are fetching $295K on eBay. That’s silly money.

Why isn’t the 996TT, which shares the engine with the GT3, seeing a similar value bounce? I think it’s the fact that it looks boring and isn’t thrilling to drive compared to a GT3 or an earlier 993. Porsche made the 996TT for a hypothetical high-speed, high-comfort executive driver, but if that fellow ever really existed he’s now driving an S65 AMG or something like that. To make the 996TT exciting, you have to modify it heavily, which sinks the resale value even further.

There’s also a perception that the 996 Turbo is garbage just because the 996 Carrera is garbage. That perception took a while to take root but now it’s unshakeable. If you drive a 997 GT3, you don’t need to explain yourself. If you drive a 993 Turbo, you don’t need to explain yourself. With a 996 Twin Turbo… some explanations will be forthcoming.

$59,900 is a lot of money to spend if you have to justify yourself to everyone at “Cars and Coffee”. So while I think that $169,900 might well be the floor for a good 993 Turbo, here’s my prediction for water-cooled Porsche Turbo values: cloudy, with no chance of sunshine.