Jon61

19 hours ago, iborguk said:

Well I’m guessing from your tank range  which is showing….either that or your right foot has fallen off. 

Don't forget that it's @Davey P's butler that does all the driving, and it's all very genteel - I'm sure you've heard the phrase "Driving Miss Davey" 

1 hour ago, Patt said:

that's £8k over his target budget. 

Some peeps either need to buy a budget spec + high miles car or aim their sights and a more realistic car.

It's all very well to suggest that buyers should compromise on the spec ... before @iborguk moved that car to the thread where he'd intended to post it, it was also missing a rather important element of the desired spec for this thread's OP - the roof 

How about an obscure one ... E.R. Season 3 Episode 18 (1996-97) : Jerry the receptionist, who is always doing other things while he should be working - often involving some Get Rich Quick scheme - is looking at a magazine while on the phone to someone saying "I'm talking 200 horses ... zero to sixty in 6.1 seconds ... yeah, I'll let you drive it".  The magazine illustration is clearly the cutaway drawing of the 986 that was used in all the 986.1 publicity material, brochure etc

(It turned out that Jerry was masquerading as a doctor and trying to sell his sperm to a sperm bank )

On 12/7/2022 at 5:42 PM, Daboy3000 said:

I had to double check, that Sunday date is odd. 

I've only just read the later parts of this thread, so responding to a bit of an old detail I'm afraid. But I came across a similar oddity when I was trying to work out if an early Boxster that cropped up on this forum was my first (1998) one, despite the fact that the registration date shown online didn't match up exactly to what I knew it was. It WAS the same car, and I came to the conclusion that when DVLA digitised their earlier records, they didn't transfer the full dates, but just the month and year.

21 hours ago, K.I.T.T. said:

Still have the MDR-32, although this has been retired in favour of an aftermarket Becker unit.

I just mentioned it in case you were interested in selling it - it's not often anyone on here expresses any interest in a MD player!

On 10/18/2022 at 9:11 PM, Daboy3000 said:

I did think about sourcing a tape deck, that is what mine would have come with from the factory.  Recently I discovered Porsche had offered a minidisc player, the MDR 32, if it wasn't so expensive then it would have been great, because I have a load of my DJ sets from the late 90's on minidisc but don't have anything to play them on! 🤣

I had a MDR-32 in my last Boxster, but I think it was removed by one of the intermediate owners before the current owner bought it - @K.I.T.T. is that right, or do you have it lying around in your parts bin?

49 minutes ago, andy_l said:

That's a great pic Jon.

Thanks - any photo is improved by having a silver 981 and some mountains in it 

Hope you're having a great time - we really enjoyed our trip around northern Spain. I've just looked through the photos in your own thread too - looks like you make a habit of taking your car to photogenic places! 

1 hour ago, andy_l said:

Because you can never have too many mountains

I'd agree.  But if you'd stopped just a few hundred metres out of the town you could have got the lake in as well! 

(That's assuming there's any water left in it now - it was pretty low in 2017!)

4 minutes ago, zlac017 said:

Amazing! Where is this?

Riaño, in the Picos de Europa mountains, northern Spain. 

6 hours ago, cptspaulding said:

A few of us, including myself, have gone the eBay route for £14 & found it perfectly functional. Did mine about 6 months back & it's still working fine.

2 hours ago, IainR said:

Excellent, Thanks for that. I shall spend the balance on some V power in that case.

But @cptspaulding's 'My Ride' says he has a 987, so presumably he was just saying that the EBay switch is ok for that. I assume @IainR was hoping that someone could confirm it works on a 981? (I can't help with that myself, I'm afraid, just clarifying in case you missed that detail - perhaps because you were viewing the forum on a phone where it doesn't show people's details.)

23 minutes ago, bally4563 said:

Don’t be put off by the Red interior, in a photo it can look Orange , but in the flesh totally different, the Rs60 I once owned was testament to that, very smart.

I'd second that - as someone who has (voluntarily! ) chosen to have red interiors in 2 of three 3 Boxsters I've owned. I think it often looks quite garish in the photos, but doesn't look anywhere near as in-your-face if you see it in real life, so I'd definitely suggest seeing it for real before deciding just on the basis of that. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it. I don't even have a problem with the dash reflecting in the windscreen, which some people suggest can be a problem - I can't say I even noticed that until I used a GoPro to take video from inside the windscreen - in bright sunshine that showed a lot of reflection of the dash that I've not noticed myself.

Just to add another little explanatory detail about the tyre pressure issue. Yes, tyre manufacturers know more about tyres and tyre pressure than car manufacturers, but crucially, what they don't know (as @MickH mentions above) is the weight of the car the tyres will be fitted to. Broadly speaking, it's the tyre pressure multiplied by the contact area between the tyres and the road, that support the weight of the car. Hence for a given weight of car, the higher the pressure, the smaller the contact area - as the tyres become rounder, with less of a flat spot at ground level when looked at from the side. Car manufacturers therefore specify the tyre pressure partly to determing the size, shape and behaviour of the contact area. For example, the width of the contact area is always going to be pretty much the width of the tyre tread, but the length (front to back) will be significantly affected by the pressure. And changing the width:length ratio of that contact area will change things like the cornering dynamics of the tyre.

So I'd also vote for using as a starting point the manufacturer's recommendations for the specific application, not just based on the tyre itself.

And the successful update message  on your history screen is identical to mine, @Buzzfox, so it definitely seems to have worked properly, even if with a few hiccups. I guess the DVD drive jamming could be because the drives often don't get a lot of use on modern cars - I tried a CD in mine just before I did the update, and I'm fairly sure it would have been the first time it had ever had a disc in it, as I always use a USB stick and the Jukebox. And I assume your update discs were (or at least appear to be) the genuine Porsche discs, like mine, so it shouldn't be a problem with those (I think the EBay seller of upgrades a few years ago was sending out copies the updates on DVD-Rs rather than original discs). Anyway, glad you were able to get it sorted, but it must have been a bit of a worry!

30 minutes ago, Graham BGTS said:

A question if I may regarding the GTS logo on the seat headrests….. when these were colour embroidered as a factory option, what colour would it have been on a sapphire blue car? 
 

I’ve only ever seen red embroidery. 

It wasn't  related to the exterior colour. You could specify the GTS Interior Package with either Carmine Red or Rhodium Silver as the 'contrasting colour', and that contrasting colour was used for the GTS logo, various bits of stitching, the seatbelt edges, and the logo on the floor mats. I don't know if you got the embroidered logo even without the GTS Interior Package option (the 2015 brochure seems to imply you did), but if you did, I think it would then always have been in red. And I suspect most people who got the choice chose red anyway as from the few pictures I've seen, it was a lot more obvious than the silver stitching.

18 minutes ago, Menoporsche said:

Exactly; not sure my range indicator has ever gone lower than 60km. 20 miles is 30km, that’s another 8-10 quid on the top-up!

Chicken!  You probably won't be aware then that the range dispay doesn't display less than 10 miles - it just shows "--" or something similar once it's less than 10, presumably because Porsche think it's not accurate enough to rely on at that stage. Which is probably fair enough, but decidedly unhelpful at the time I've seen it a couple of times in 24 years - not through choice, but I've always got away with it.

I don't think the Boxster has had a 60 litre tank since the 986.1, I believe it's always been 64 litres from the 986.2 on, apart from oddities like the Spyder which ironically had less (not sure if they needed the space for something else, or if it was just a canny way of saving weight).

42 minutes ago, moospeed said:

It's good to have the knowledge available but now I need to un-see it

I'm sure they are there for a reason, but I'm not convinced that it's to keep water off the discs. I think centrifugal force is quite enough to disperse most water off discs once a car is in motion, with the action of the pads on the discs (and cross-drilling if applicable) once braking starts doing the rest. Personally I think their purpose is more likely to be one of those that @Paul P mentions above.

I did my update yesterday, and it all went very smoothly.

I ordered online late Tuesday afternoon, having already taken a photo of my 'System version' screen on the PCM, and my VIN on the windscreen. David emailed about an hour later asking for these, and for confirmation that I had a USB socket. After sending these back, I got a 'Thank you' email from him. 🙂 The update package arrived, signed-for post, on Friday. As other people have found - no instructions included (why on earth - surely it would be easier to include them or email them for everyone??) but I didn't bother asking for them and just used what had been posted on here previously - particularly by @BrianJ and @Greenman (thanks both ).

I put a GoPro in the car pointing at the PCM and recording video while the update progressed - I thought it might be useful to refer back to if anything went wrong - I'd be able to see if any messages had appeared that I'd missed while I wasn't at the car. As it happens I didn't need it, but it does enable me to see what it was doing while I wasn't watching.

I'd meant to put the ignition on (supported by a CTEK connected under the bonnet) but forgot about the ignition until I'd already put the software disc in, and at that stage I didn't want to do anything that might interrupt the software update (V4.75 to V4.76 on mine), as it had warned with an on-screen message, so I just left it to do its thing. The software update took nearly 16 mins, but although normally my PCM would switch off after 10 mins in those circumstances, it stayed on throughout, so it seems that the update process kept the PCM awake. A message on-screen shows the progress; it updates 4 modules, but in a strange order: it seems to very briefly show 'Update of Module 4 of 4', switch immediately to 3, then 2 then 1, then do 2, 3 & 4 again before it finishes. Right at the end it said 'Restarting system' and the screen went off ... and then did nothing - it didn't come back on automatically. I suspect this was because the ignition was off - as more than 10 mins had gone by, the PCM shut itself down as soon as it wasn't busy any longer. Putting the key in the ignition woke the PCM up again at one of the 'normal' screens, although it seemed unresponsive to any buttons or knobs for about 30 seconds until (of its own accord) it showed a message saying 'Medium not playable' (ie it took a while to really wake up and check the disc in the slot - I hadn't noticed this message when I first put the disc in), then a few seconds later it showed an 'Update' tab with the message "System successfully updated to version PCM31MOPF_V476_RDW.

After Greenman's experience with a failed software update, I'd considered putting the software disc in again at this point (on the grounds that it probably wouldn't bother doing the update again if it really was now on V4.76, but would finish the update if it hadn't completed successfully the first time). But the message above seemed to show that the update had worked, and before I did the next steps I also checked the 'System version' screen again to check it was now showing V4.76 as expected.

With the ignition now on, I then did the next steps, starting with the USB stick (4GB, but with just one 22kB file copie_scr.sh on it). Plugging that in gives a 'No valid music data found' message for a few seconds but oddly nothing else to indicate that it's doing anything. I waited at least 2 minutes before removing it, then kept the INFO button down for 10 seconds to restart the PCM (a feature not mentioned in the manual, I think). Then the map DVDs in order - with the first one you get another warning not to interrupt the update process, then a screen asking you to confirm that you want to update to version 6.7.1, then briefly an empty progress bar, but then the PCM restarted itself again, put up the usual 'Don't be an idiot if the Satnav tells you to do something stupid' message, requiring a 'Confirm' press, then it showed 'Loading Navi' on an ordinary PCM screen for a slightly disconcerting 45 seconds before going back to the progress bar and proceding with the update.

From there, Nav disc 1 took less than 9 minutes to finish - the progress bar shot up rapidly from about 40% to 100% just before it decided it had finished. (I assume it finished this disc properly despite this, although I don't see how you could check other than going through the whole process again.) The next 4 discs took various times between 10 mins and 19 mins to process - unlike the first disc, they didn't need any user interaction after putting the disc in, and the progress bar seemed to move more uniformly too. I got all the other oddities that others have noted (wrong disc number at first, and disc 5 of 4 for the last one). At the end of disc 5 the PCM restarted automatically again before ejecting the disc - I then started to look at the info screens to check the update - at one point getting to the 'System version' screen that just said 'System version:    V' with no numbers at all - but after a few seconds a new Update screen popped up saying 'Navigation database successfully updated to version 6.7.1, and now the 'System version' screen showed the correct 'System version: V4.76'. Only at this point did the last disc eject - I think in my haste I had started doing things on the screen before the update process had truly finished, but with no obvious ill effects.

I now have a History screen showing 4 lines of software update entries (PCM31CFG... , PCM31HDD... , PCM31APP... & PCM31IOC...) and a further one line for the navigation data update (6.7.1 PCM31_ECE...).

The map screen initially looks worryingly blank, until you zoom out and realise it is centred somewhere Algeria (!) ... possibly the furthest south (nearest to zero latitude) it will go on zero longitude. Oddly, even with the car in my garage, the satnav doesn't think the car is in Algeria where the map is centred though - it thinks it's just outside Stockholm in Sweden (!!), as you can tell by asking it to route from what it thinks is its current location to any of your stored favourites. I found that even after leaving the car parked outside the garage for easily long enough to lock onto the satellite signals, I still had to drive it at least 100m before it updated the screen to show where I really was. But from there everything looked fine - I've checked that a new Sussex road and the A555 Manchester Airport link road are there, plus a rerouted section of German autobahn that I know of, and I've checked that it will use the Sussex one for routing.

TLDR version: I'd recommend this update package to anyone that wants the new maps. The main things I'd add to what has been said already about the process are:

- check the system version after using the first disc, before going on to use the USB stick and the nav discs, in case the software update hasn't completed sucecssfully;

- after putting in the first nav disc (only), hang around until the progress bar (re-)appears and starts moving up before walking away from the car, in case you need to respond to any on-screen messages - you shouldn't need to for the later discs (and I suppose it's possible that the messages will time out even if you don't respond);

- don't worry if the PCM seems to hang/appear unresponsive for up to a minute at various stages.

The first time I used mine this year, after quite a long period unused, I tried to open the roof with the remote key - it unlatched and opened perhaps 10cm then stopped. I couldn't get it to open any further but I could close it again (with the key). The same thing happened a second time, but then on the third it opened normally and has been fine ever since. I didn't get as far as trying to open it with the normal interior switch, so don't know if the same would have happened from there. (Sometimes I wonder if the signal from the key - particularly when keeping the button pressed to put the windows/roof down - can get interrupted by something nearby, or affected by a slightly weak bettery in the key, though the way it stopped in exactly the same position made me think it probably wasn't that.) Also, I don't have a code reader so don't know if the glitch generated any error codes. Anyway, I didn't worry too much about it as I put it down to a sticky microswitch inthe mechanism (though lack of use) - I think there are various ones that detect when the roof has successfully got to certain positions.

The battery had not been flat in this case though - it's always on a trickle charger when it's in the garage. But the flat battery could be a red herring in your case too, particularly if the car has been unused for a while (which a flat battery suggests is likely), so I'd also suspect a microswitch in the first instance.

I think the OPC has been worse than useless and I'd be pushing back on paying what they've already asked for, let alone any more, unless it sounds like they know what needs doing and there's a good reason it should cost so much. But I'd have a go at fixing it yourself first:

I'd say it's always worth being aware of the manual procedure for operating the roof in case the mechanism fails - so that if you get somewhere away from a lockable garage with the roof stuck down you can get it back up again. There's something in the manual about it, or various videos online (eg the one linked below) that tell you how to do it. In this case, as it sounds as if it unlatches properly, I think I'd have a go at disconnecting the mechanism behind the seats (using the manual or following the video) and moving the roof manually a few times to see if that fixes it by freeing up the microswitches. The video also talks about the microswitches in the latch mechanism (which the manual doesn't talk about) so may give you some other ideas what to look at. And if you get it fixed, I'd suggest sending the OPC a suitable bill for your time 😀

Good luck.

6 minutes ago, Buzzfox said:

 So nobody on here has done this map update without using the software disc yet?

 Am I brave enough to try?????

42 minutes ago, Boxer boy said:

Sometimes to keep with ministry targets and profiles , even though the punter has booked it in for say two new rear tyres ( or what ever ) the garages fails it first then fits the rubber then retests for free .

Off topic again briefly, though I think the OP has got the opinions he asked for ...

I have heard people claim that MOT testers sometimes find a reason to fail cars 'to avoid too high a pass rate' - but I've never heard of the situation you describe, and I'm not sure I believe it - if I took my car to have new tyres (say) and then an MOT test, and they failed it first on the tyres, I'd be livid (to have a MOT fail on the car's record) and would be complaining to the DVSA about the test station.

It's also failed its MOT 8 times - including no less than three (separate) times for tyres below the legal limit! The very first time the car was taken for an MOT - at just 3 years old - it had illegal tyres 😲 . So I'd say its 5 owners don't seem to have been particularly careful ones ...

7 minutes ago, Buzzfox said:

Wouldn’t the software disc that ships with the map discs upgrade it to 4.76 and therefore eliminate that problem or have I misunderstood what that disc does?

Richard posted in the other (older) satnav thread that (as of 2020 at least), V3.xx PCMs can only be updated as far as 3.43 - you need something originating as V4 to be able to upgrade up to 4.76. (Though the zoom thing does sound like a bug that should have been fixed - but I assume the official OPC 'fix' for it, is not to upgrade a V3 unit!)

I've taken the plunge and ordered from David - I'll probably be doing my upgrade just after @Greenman by the sound of it. I nearly upgraded when the EBay/Lukas discussion took place on here in 2019. Compared to that, the cost has gone up £30, but considering how little I used the car in 2020 & 2021, in retrospect I don't think I'd have got my money's worth from the 2018 maps, so I'm glad I procrastinated. 

I've just done a bit of investigating on mine - a MY2016 which has never had the maps updated, or any work on the PCM.

It's PCM3.1, system V4.75, but although I can look at the 'Current System' IDs, the 'History' tab just shows "No version history available", so I can't see what maps are installed (although they'll clearly be the ones it left the factory with).

With a CTEK connected under the bonnet, the PCM switches off after 10 minutes in mine with the ignition off. I thought perhaps putting the key in the ignition (but not turning the ignition on) might make a difference, but it still switches off after 10 minutes. I don't think opening and closing the doors reset the timer either, so it looks like I'm going to have to keep the engine running to do the update - unless I try leaving the ignition on, switch off the aircon and as many lights as I can, and monitor the battery voltage to see if the CTEK can balance the ignition-on current drain.

3 hours ago, ½cwt said:

That's what  had before, but blue strip is not accepted except for EU and EEA countries unless a standard specification on your country's plates like it is in Turkey for example.

Did you in fact mean to say that a blue strip with an EU circle of stars is not accepted? The gov.uk website linked above states that a UK identifier with the Union flag is acceptable to drive outside the UK, and as far as I know the 'UK' and the Union flag are normally on a blue background, just like the 'EU' and stars were. 

40 minutes ago, Ringer250 said:

Only thing I did differently was to plug the ctek charger in instead of keeping the engine running. Ctek did get a bit warm but not too hot.

Do you mean that you also had the ignition on but the engine not running, Steve? Or does just plugging in the Ctek stop the PCM from shutting down? In which case, is that connected to the lighter socket or to the battery connection points under the bonnet?