What to Look for When Buying a PORSCHE Cayenne! – Husman Bros

Today we’re going to show you what to look for if you’re buying a first generation Cayenne or a Porsche 955. Before we go too much further for more content like this, be sure to subscribe.

I’m Justin, and this is our cousin Rob. The Cayenne Whisperer. Rob is here today to kind of tell us what to look for. He knows these cars inside and out. You may recognize him from our offroad video.

We’re happy to have him back here today, Rob. Yeah. Thanks, Justin. We’ve got here. Yeah. So we’ve got three different cars here today. We’re going to go over some slight variations and what you should look for, what makes them a little bit different.

Over on this side, we’ve got a 2004 Cayenne Turbo. In the middle, we’ve got a 2005 Cayenne S and over on the other side of Justin, we have a very rare 2006 Cayenne Turbo S. What’s nice about each one of these, each one offers it a little bit different performance, a little bit different perspective on how it can be modified.

And we can do a lot of great things with these cars. You bet. So let’s start with the one we don’t have here, the base model V6 Cayenne. What can you tell us about that car? Well, it utilizes a 3.2 liter Volkswagen sourced motor, about 240 HP.

So it’s a little bit underpowered. It’s great for trips to the mall. It’s great for maybe 70 miles an hour down the road. But it’s not something you want to focus on. We want to focus on v8. We want to focus on Turbos. That’s where the power is.

Absolutely. So this is the entry level V Eight. This is just the regular Cayenne S. These are a starter Cayenne, we’ll say. Now, I do want to say that all three of these cars are secret performance cars.

I know a lot of people look at these like minivans, but these absolutely are performance beasts. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with the S. Absolutely. So the S, as you mentioned, entry level performance V8.

It has a 4.5 liter V8 motor, about 340 HP. Most of the S’s have steel spring suspensions, so we don’t really see many air suspensions. On this particular vehicle. But this is a great, very capable vehicle, especially if you want to take it off road.

Especially if we want to do a little bit of highway cruising. Aaron’s not here, so I’m going to talk some trash, depending on the driver. Now, I have absolutely taken this on a road trip. I drove it to Vegas a couple of years ago, and it was just a fantastic road trip.

Even though it is lifting, it’s got the knob of your tires on it when I was carving through some of the canyons in Utah. Just an amazing ride. This is a great entry level V8 because they’re more common.

This was the first one that Porsche introduced in 2004. And what’s great about that, there’s a lot of them out there, which means you can get them all the down as low as Gosh $4,000, $5,000. Of course, it’s going to have really high miles, and then it’s going to go up.

As we lower the miles and have maintenance records and have a better condition, we’ll see these S’s probably somewhere in the 10, 12, maybe 13,000 range for low mileage vehicles with documented maintenance records.

You bet. The one thing to remember is that even though this is entry level, if you’re not someone who does your own wrenching repairs on, this can be rather expensive. And at this age, you’re going to have some repairs.

I know that we had a lot of front end stuff to do on this one and a lot of suspension things to deal with. And that can add up very quickly. It is still a Porsche. It really can. However, there are some really good aftermarket parts out there that are available.

They’re not as expensive as factory parts or Porsche authorized parts. However, they come from reputable sources and reputable companies. So we can somewhat reduce our maintenance bill on these things.

If we shop correctly and we find. Those right parts, you got to buy the right Porsche up front. What is it they say? The cheapest Porsche is the most expensive one you’ll ever buy. That’s absolutely right.

Let’s talk about the second most expensive one you’ll ever buy. Turbo. This particular turbo, it’s a 2004 turbo. It has just a bit over 100,000 miles on it. Maintenance wise, it’s pretty well documented.

So it was a little bit more expensive than maybe one that has very high mileage and is very undocumented. This particular one. Has some really rare options. And what’s great about this is, when we take it out, we have a lot of Porsche people walk up to me and they say, I’ve never seen it.

I’ve only seen pictures. This is the first time they’ve seen some of these rare options in real life. But performance wise, we’re talking about a vehicle with about 460 HP because of the twin turbos intercooled Twin turbos.

So you say this is a twin turbo still a V eight, right? Yes. 4.5 liter. That’s correct. Is it the same motor altogether? No, it’s really actually a different motor. Porsche used two different casting methodologies on the S and on the turbo.

So this one utilizes a different casting where everything was casted as one piece, versus this one had sleeves inserted for each cylinder. So this is a more robust motor because obviously, it puts out a lot more horsepower.

That’s fair. So I know this one has some rare accessories you’ve talked about. Before we go too much further, I want to settle something that came up on a different social media. I call this a truck.

What do you call this? I call it a truck, too. I agree. Porsche so overbuilt this first gen. And just to remind everyone, the first gen is 2003 to 2006. Right. These things are so capable off road. When we see what they’re capable of doing, it’s almost as capable as a Jeep.

And I’ve seen the video to prove it. Yeah, I know. I’ve seen the video you’re talking about, as well. It’s one of these going up what is it? Devil’s backbone or something ridiculous like that? Absolutely.

And it made it don’t stop. Yeah, right. Just don’t stop. It was great if the Jeep folks all were jumping up and down and applauding because they couldn’t believe that they actually saw a Porsche take that trail.

These things are absolutely beast. Now, tell us about some of the rare options on this one. Right and the rare options. That’s why I bought this, because they’re unobtainable. Unobtainium, as it were.

Let’s go ahead and come around to the side, and we’ll take a look at a couple of things that make this Cayenne unique. Numero uno. It’s the infamous Cayenne rear tire carrier. Now, it’s interesting. A lot of they’re they’re pretty controversial.

A lot of folks don’t like them. Personally, I think it’s pretty cool. Now, some folks have asked, I love this. Can I duplicate this on my car? Yes. For about $8,000. That’s the amount of money it would cost to to get all the parts and then have all the additional body work done to it.

But so the best thing to do is try like heck to find one. And you know, of course, good luck with that. Yeah, I know. In my search for Cayenne’s, which took quite some time, I saw exactly one of these on a truck with the cover actually.

But it was a salvage title truck. So I shied away from it. I wish I’d known how rare or is. It probably was still worth it. Exactly. Always shy away from those salvage titles. That makes resell harder later.

Exactly. But let me just show you real quick how easily this opens. There’s an electronically actuated lock right here. You simply pull it back all the way. I think we can get it back far enough. And then, of course, the rear hatch lifts very, very easily.

Great option. Very rare, very cool. The other thing that this particular Cayenne has is I’m going to slam this. It has the actually factory rock rails here. So this came as part of an option called the off road design package.

It includes these rock rails which actually go very far into the center line of the car to protect the car. And there’s an additional rock guard up front. It’s currently not mounted as we have some maintenance items that we’re performing on this car.

But it’s a steel plate as well and is very, very tough and durable. So even though these are just now getting into the offroad area, these are really built for offroading. They really are and Porsche proved it.

So in 2009, they took the 957 series. They did just a few modifications and they ran a 5000 miles ruling race called the Trans Siberia race. Okay. They swept the podium and they decided, oh, that was fun.

They came back next year. They built 24 of them. And the 24 were actually. Some for the factory racers and some for privateers. And once again, I think they swept the top ten finishes or finishers or something like that.

These things are beasts. They’re fantastic offroad and with a few mods, we can take them rock crawling. Let’s talk about the most rare one we have out here. Now, this is a 2006, yes, 2006 Cayenne turbo A.

So, Turbo good. S must be better, right? Absolutely. Porsche has a reputation of doing special versions. Anything that you see that’s s GTS, RS that means that’s a special version and kind of Porsche nomenclature.

This is a one year only model and it bumped up the horsepower, as we recall. It’s 460 on that. This one’s 520 stock. This particular one has a tune and some custom parts on it. And we suspect we’ve not run it on a Dyno yet.

We suspect that’s probably somewhere in the 550 to 570 range. Really? This thing, it’s a hot rod. There’s no other way to call it. This is a fast Mother. Took it out the other night with my son. Wanted to see how fast this thing was.

This car is no slouch. The turbo is no slouch. This thing pulled it. He couldn’t even come close to keeping up. Wow. So what’s the difference then, in the motor for this one and the turbo? It’s really more internals.

They did a tune on it, they repositioned the intercoolers. It has a different turbocharger on it, but mostly it’s a factory tune. That makes this faster. Really? Okay. Very nice. Any other rare bits on this one in particular?

Not particularly this one, although the sticker price knew. Yeah, it was chunk. And that’s what Porsche does when they do special models like SGTs. They, of course, jack up. Yeah, this one was around $130,000 new.

Almost about in the mid 120s. Okay, we have the sticker for this. We do have the sticker for this one. This is a really neat car. There are a couple things that are a little different about this. I know one of them is the wheels.

Tell us about the wheels. Right, so, the S came stock with 20 inch wheels, but this particular one has the the Techno design wheels from from Porsche Tech equipment. They’re rare. They’re they were really expensive new, but they had, I think, really a great flair on them.

But one of the things one of the reasons we needed that 20 inch wheel is got to look at these brakes here. These are 390 millimeter discs with a two piece rotor. These things are huge and provide a lot of stopping power.

The only challenge is that replacing these discs, it’s a little pricey. Really? Well, you need all that stopping power when you’ve got 500 plus horsepower. Absolutely right. That’s absolutely true. And so this is a really neat car.

Really rare car to see. And if you’re looking for one of these, what is the range you should expect to pay for one? I know this one has a little higher mileage at 100 and some change. Right. And so what kind of price range are these in?

I’ve been keeping close track on the pricing on, actually, all of the Cayennes, and the normal price range on this is coming in somewhere between 18 for maybe a higher mileage. And for a lower mileage, we’re actually see them really starting to creep up into the mid teens excuse me Mid 20s. Sorry about that.

Now, because of that, this is one of those Porsches that you can buy now relatively cheaply and probably get some appreciation on it over time if you do the right things to it.

So, we’ve talked about these three great cars we have here. Now let’s talk about some of the things that you want to look out for, at least externally, when you’re buying one of these trucks. Yeah, that’s a great point.

There are some things that are kind of on almost all the Cayennes. The first one that we’re going to talk about are the lights. This particular one has been the lights have been replaced with LEDs. So this is probably not a good example, but almost all of these have light issues.

And it just happens because of miles, age, and for sure, heat cycles. What happens is the connection inside starts to degrade over time. And you, as the driver, when you start the vehicle up or when you’re running it, you’ll get a lot of errors in your dashboard.

It’ll be dipped light beam, cornering light, signal lights. All of those can be easily remedied by doing a few simple tricks, which we’re going to show later. Excellent. What else can we look for when we’re looking at these cars?

So another big one is the rear hatch shocks. They degrade over time. It’s a fairly easy replacement. Takes about 2 hours to really do it right. It’s also a good time to get inside and clean some areas that probably have never seen the light of day, but it’s an easy fix.

It’s only maybe less than $100 to get all of the parts. Yeah, in parts. Right now, I’m not the Cayenne whisperer, so I actually paid for this. So I can tell you it’s about $500 to pay someone to fix those shocks.

I’ve not yet seen a Cayenne of this generation where the shocks weren’t burned out. They all are. And really, there’s just a few external things that we need to be looking at. On air suspension cars, you should always look for a corner drooping that would indicate potentially that one of the shocks needs to be rebuilt or replaced.

They do wear out over time because there are seals and mechanical and electronic parts that could wear out. I know one of the other expenses to look out for on these is that headliner. These are older cars now, nearly 20 years old, some of them, and it’s really important to keep an eye on that.

We’re going to talk about that a little bit later and show you what that looks like. Anything else we should be considering when we’re just approaching one of these cars to purchase it? Well, like any other purchase, you really want to look at the overall condition of the body.

Does it have any dings? Doesn’t have any dents. A Carfax report is, although not the real one, source of truth, because sometimes things can be hidden, but you definitely want to look at overall. Does the car track straight, for instance, when it’s driving?

Is the steering wheel crooked? Those are indicators that either suspension parts have maybe begun to wear out or potentially the car has been hitting it and has seen body damage. Sure, the repairs on these can get expensive unless you’re a hands on kind of person.

These cars are now on their third and fourth owners. So in case a lot of cases, there’s a lot of deferred maintenance that goes on with these things. Now, I know that you’ve got a lift, so we’re going to take this over and take a look underneath this and show it some of the other things that we need to look at when we’re looking at buying of these things.

So let’s go ahead and do that now. Absolutely. Sounds good. We’ll see you over at my place. So when evaluating the purchase of a Cayenne, one of the important things is to determine if the coolant pipes have been changed out.

Now, the factory equipped these vehicles with plastic coolant pipes, and they run, actually, between the V of the engine. The other challenge is that the starter is down there, too. And if those pipes do break, they can potentially not only ruin the starter, but ruin other components of the engine due to massive heat cycles.

And over the years, these almost always break. One of the challenges then is when you buy it, how do you determine if it has plastic or metal? Most folks would say the only way to really find out is you have to take off the air intake.

But we’ve determined that using a mechanics mirror and putting it in one very small window on the back of the motor, we can actually see if it’s plastic or if it’s metal. Now, the place you put the mirror is just behind this fuel rail right here.

So if we put it down and have it bent to the right angle, we can actually fish around and see the coolant mirrors. Now, the way to tell is it will be a very small, thin, round looking, thin band of metal.

And on either side of that is either going to be a dull finish that indicates plastic or a shiny finish that indicates metal. This particular one, we’ve determined has plastic coolant pipe, meaning that we will be changing them out.

And of course, we’ll have a full on video of how we go through that process. There’s always certain things that you want to check, kind of the duh. You just really need to look at these things. One of them is engine oil.

You want to see if it’s like super black or if it’s filled or overfilled. In this case, the previous owner actually overfilled the crankcase, and that’s not really good. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to get the engine oil out of here and then we wanted to put fresh engine oil in.

So what we’ll do is we’ll now the oil coming out of here. Now it’s going to be almost perfect. Right then you can see it’s a little bit full. I probably could maybe take out about a half quart, which there’s a trick to do that and I’ll talk about that in a few minutes.

But that’s really you can see here, it’s like super shiny. See how clear that is? Now out. The other thing that you’ll want to check under the hood, just basic things that you can see. We already talked about how to look at the coolant pipes.

That’s a critical one. But one thing about a lot of these vehicles, they’re getting a little bit older. Sometimes the battery or the battery charging system is not really efficient. In this case, we went ahead and we put a trickle charger lead on here.

It’s very easy to put it on. You’ll just simply run a negative lead to this grounding strap here and then another lead to the positive underneath this little cover, right that’s right here. These parts, they’re available readily online.

They cost somewhere under $20. And they really make keeping your car charge very efficient if you have the right trickle charger. So there’s a couple of other things that you want to look for and or listen for.

Normally you’re going to want to if the car has a lot of miles on it, chances are maybe the spark plugs and the coil packs have not been replaced. The good news is it’s a pretty easy job. It’s about a two, three hour job.

It just requires taking off these two panels here as well as these air pumps. And then you can easily change those out. Another thing that is really critical, especially on the Cayenne S, they had a particular manufacturing process.

And unfortunately, one of the side effects is that some of those cylinders could end up with what’s called bore scoring. In other words, they actually end up scoring the side of the piston. And it makes a very distinct, almost knocking sound when the motor at cold start.

And it settles out a little bit as the car warms up. But you can really hear that bore scoring, knocking upon cold start. That’s something you really want to listen for. It’s either going to come from this part of the engine or this part of the engine.

You’re going to hear a decent amount of chatter. Right from here. That’s because you do have a cam and timing chain in here. Fuel injectors make quite a bit of noise as well as the secondary air pump.

So we’ll start this car up in a few moments and you can just kind of hear some of that stuff, but nevertheless, there’s going to be some noise coming from here. But what you’re really listening for is a distinct knocking sound on one side of the cylinder of the engine or the other.

So now that we’ve taken a look at some of the things that you want to address or look at under the hood, we’re going to transition to looking under the car. We’re going to raise it up on the lift, and I’m going to point out several things that you need to look for when you’re evaluating to purchase a Cayenne.

Okay, we’re going to lift the car, but prior to lifting it, one of the things that you want to do is make sure that the suspension is turned off. This particular vehicle is equipped with an air suspension and as you start to lift it, needless to say, the air suspension wants to do stuff.

So we’re going to tell it to go in basically into standby mode so that we can lift it and it will create no problems when lifting. Okay, when we turn off the air suspension, the engine does need to be started.

So what we’re going to do is I’m going to take this switch over here, which adjusts the level of the air suspension. We’re going to push it forward until we get a warning or a notice on the dashboard saying that the suspension is off.

So I’m going to go ahead and do that right now. Push forward. You’re going to keep pushing and remain in that position and then soon we now see that regulation switched off. That means the air suspension is now turned off and we can safely lift the vehicle.

So now that we’ve safely lifted the car, we’re going to go front to back and look at some common areas that potentially are points, especially if these vehicles start piling on the miles. There’s definitely a few things that tend to go out and need to be replaced over time.

So we’re going to start over here on the front wheel and we’re going to look at a couple of things. One, if you actually can run your finger along the edge of the brake disc, you can see if it’s smooth.

In this case, it’s completely smooth. That means that the disc is in good shape. When the lip gets to be a certain certain depth, at that point, it’s time to replace the rotor. We’re going to notice here this case.

This has a very as a smooth lip. It’s in really good shape. We have taken a look at the brake pads. They’re basically brand new. So that is that’s. That’s also a good thing. Now you’ll see it’s, this is dirty, obviously, you know, as we get it in and we start working on it, we’ll clean all this stuff up.

By the time we’re done, it’ll all look incredibly good and incredibly new. There’s a couple other things we’re going to look at. One of them is right here. This is the tie rod link right here coming from the steering rack.

And if you’ll notice, it’s ripped. So this tie rod does need to be replaced. Now, you’ll also notice here, this looks to maybe be a little bit separating. This is where the bottom A arm goes into the wheel carrier.

This probably also needs to be replaced. The problem with these lower A arms, you can tell this one’s pretty rusted. We haven’t had a chance to determine if there’s any play in the bushings. But really, at 130,000 miles, those are generally going to have to be replaced.

It’s a fairly easy job. It only takes a couple of hours if you can get the vehicle up in the air. Okay. As we move back along the car, there’s probably not a lot to see here because it’s covered by these body covers.

Now, if they’re missing, that’s a good time to look up under the engine and see if there’s any leaks. You’ll know, they’re readily apparent because you’ll see crusted on or dried oil or other fluids.

Once again, as we move back along this axis, the main thing that we’re going to want to check is the drive shaft. This is called the carden shaft. In this particular bearing, it’s underneath. This metal plate here has a tendency to wear out.

In the case of one that’s worn out, the obvious symptom is an extreme shaking and really knocking sound coming from the middle of the car at slow speeds. In that case, you can actually get the car up on a lift.

Come in here and shake this. You can see there’s not a lot of play here. That means that this particular bearing actually is still in pretty good shape. If the bearing was shot, it would have a lot of play and you’d really almost be able to rattle it around.

So this one looks like it’s in pretty good shape at this point. It doesn’t need to be changed, not unlike the front in the back. There’s definitely some things you want to look for. A lot of times these lower control arms do need to be replaced.

It’s based upon age and the condition of the bushings. If you are able to flash or get a light up in here, you can look in here to see if there’s any additional wear or cracking. That’s usually a good indication that these need to be changed out.

We’re also going to talk a little bit about the exhaust. Now this one has a pretty serious aftermarket exhaust, but you do want to look and see if there’s any scraping, any rust, any holes in the exhaust that’s a potential gotcha that could cost quite a bit of money to have that fixed.

So those are some of the basic things that you’re looking at when you’re looking at purchasing a 955 or 2003 to 2006 Cayenne, or a 957, which would be a 2008 to 2010 Cayenne. Now we’re going to transition over to another Cayenne we happen to have here and it’s going to give us a couple of different views because it doesn’t have the underside body panel.

So we’ll be able to look to see if there’s for instance, any leaks or anything that’s that’s noticeable. And that’s a really good indication of some additional maintenance items that you might need to consider.

So on the other Cayenne that we just looked at, the Cayenne Turbos, we saw that it had an aftermarket exhaust with some very large diameter exhaust tubes. This particular vehicle has the stock exhaust.

You can tell it has a muffler unit that almost goes across the entire vehicle. There’s actually an easy hack. We can actually increase the sound of this muffler by simply lowering it a little bit, taking off the exhaust tubes and then putting in a piece of flexible exhaust pipe, one and seven, eight inch diameter into the holes.

And what it will do is it will actually increase the sound of the car and make it sound great on overrev. So a bonus option on this particular car is it had what’s called the offroad appearance package or offroad design package.

And one of the components is these very robust. Rock guards that Porsche put on there. They’re extremely thick. They are going to definitely protect the underside of the car when we take it off road.

So one of the bonus features about this car is it has the incredibly rare Porsche rear tire carrier. Many people for many people, they’ve seen them in pictures, but they’ve actually never seen one in person.

I get a lot of great comments on this feature. Let me just show you how it works real quick. There’s an electronic button electronically actuated activated, and you can see the tire easily swings up so that you can open.

The rear hatch on every 955 and 957. One of the big problems on the interior is that the headliner eventually sags. And as you can see, this one has it pretty bad. It’s actually all the way back. Depending upon the shop you take it to, it’s going to be somewhere between, let’s say, $500, $1,000, depending upon the shop.

One of the things you do have to watch out for this is Alcantara, which is a name brand ultra suede. You can specify just ultra suede, and that does run less than a similarly configured Alcantara. Now, another thing that happens on a lot of these vehicles are the seatbacks fall off and there’s different ways to reattach them.

I’ve seen some people actually run a screw into them. I’ve seen other people use double sided sticky tape, but there’s definitely a couple of different ways to handle that. All right, so I’m sorry that you couldn’t be here for most of this video.

Yeah, I’m kind of salty about that. Was this a Cayenne bros. Now we’re trying to squeeze you out a little bit. So thanks again to Cousin Rob. Thank you, Rob Whisper, for all the help he gave us. So if you have any comments about something we missed on these cars, or any questions in particular that you’d like to ask about buying one of these things, I’d like to ask you.

We don’t buy any more Cayenne for a little while. We’re trying to corner the market. What do you like? The Hunt Brothers Husman Bros subscribe and thanks so much for watching. See you next time.