[robg]

Originally Posted by JST

That is interesting. There are some potential quibbles, and the fact that he doesn't have enough data points to talk about the 987.2S makes the analysis less useful than I'd like, but it's informative.

One thing the jumped out at me: There's an $8,000 price difference between the 987.1 and 987.2 base cars. My first thought was that that was driven by reliability concerns, and that it underlines that people are bad at valuing risk, because an $8,000 difference based on the risk of an engine failure means that you're estimating there's something like a 30-50 percent chance that the engine will fail (depending on how much you plan to pay for a replacement engine). And while the IMS problem is bad, it ain't that bad, even in the 2005s.

But actually the difference between the 987.1 and 987.2 base models is more significant. There was a meaningful bump in displacement and power in the 987.2 base cars, so my guess is that a big chunk of that difference is explained by the technical changes, not reliability.

It would be interesting to compare the S cars, because there the changes were much smaller; the S cars make more power but the delta isn't as meaningful, and the rest of the features are pretty similar. To me, the difference in price between an '08 S and an '09 S is almost entirely perceived reliability improvements in the 9A1. Sadly, he doesn't have those numbers.

Makes sense. I think his insight on how 987.1s have bottomed out depreciation-wise (in terms of model years) sooner than most cars was interesting as well. I think he said the average cost per 1000 miles on those cars is only like $100 at this point. Probably another reason why you and some others here dont' want to let go of your Boxsters...