🚗 Max needs to be talked down off this ledge; 2 car solution vol 1

Goooooood morning dear readers. Let me start by saying thank you to everyone who reached out with ideas for my TWO CAR SOLUTION🎺🎉😤.

There were many good ideas - things even reddit didn’t think of, in all their magic 8-ball-like wisdom.

Anyways, happy March 1.

Nope, its not March 2, not in spirit anyways. We all need to have a discussion about why both January and March get 31 days, but February gets only 28 three out of four years.

Why the hell don’t we take one day from Jan and March, and make Feb 30 days (a more normal, less insane number), and 31 on leap years?

I was wracking my brain about this today. The only thing I could think of is that Big Spring paid some people off so we could all get to the spring months faster.

Anyways, this is meant to be a post about cars, so stop making me talk about months and days and boring things like that, capeesh?

Today is a big day, its the first edition of TWO CAR SOLUTION🎺🎉😤, and I’m coming in with an absolute heater off the bat. Frankly, I am going to need someone to talk me off this ledge immediately, as this car checks so many boxes its going to be hard for me to not buy it.

HERE IT IS: A 2009 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S

Alright alright I hear you, “how tf can a 17 year old Porsche SUV be a good/reasonable/fun solution to your impending automotive problems?”

You’re smart, and it’s a fair question. But let me take you on a journey...

I’m going to walk you through, step by step (keeping in mind our requirements from volume 0), why this could very well be ONE of our TWO CAR SOLUTION🎺🎉😤.

We’re going to cover…

• The MAX METER - i.e. why do I like… mayhaps love this vehicle. What really sticks out to me; the highlights, the vibes.

• Practicality & Comfort (grouping together the snoozefest categories, I do these things for you, my lovely lovely reader) - i.e. will this car have enough luxury features to allow me drive 3 hours without needing an ass transplant?

• The ANTI-EMASCULATION FACTOR - i.e. can I count on this rig to be able to weather (pun intended) NY winters, ice, mud, sand, and mall parking lots without issue?

• BUDGET - i.e. what can you actually buy one of these bad boyz for?

MAX METER; I mean, its a Porsche with a Turbo S badge my friends

Alright gamers, this is the highlights section. It’s the ‘why am I writing about this’ section. The one to get YOU ALL LOCKED IN, so we can proceed through the rest of this blog in lock-step.

So yeah, this 2009 Great Recession Era SUV has some numbers that would make ol’ Mikey Mike Burry’s brow start precipitating.

MSRP in 2009 of the exact car pictured? $147k. In our amazing, inflation ridden modern economy that is the equivalent of a $225,000 car.

That’s literally Porsche 911 GT3 territory today - those start at $235k. Granted, you’d never actually be able to buy a GT3 for 235, but still! This puts into perspective the area of the market this Turbo S was occupying.

Next UP, horsepower. How much? 0.55 thousand horsepower. AKA 550, for the math geniuses among you. Enough that you’d round up, not down. A lot, in short.

ZERO TO 60? Does it matter in an SUV? In this case, YEAH. Zero to 60 in the mid 4’s my friends. Only a second slower than the same era, 8.4 Liter V10, Dodge Viper.

Looks & Vibes? APLENTY.

Just look at how beautiful this engine bay is:

& the color matched wheels surrounding the $9000 option that was Porsche’s Carbon Ceramic Brakes:

Two more highlights here for the Max Meter:

• The exhaust note: https://youtube.com/shorts/5MVI7zXtSLo?si=48JaoZQmSiob0vCW (my neighbors would hate me)

• The key is a cute lil miniature version of the car:

  

Practicality & Comfort; this thing has some absolutely preposterous amenities

With the context that this car cost nearly a quarter-milly in today’s dollars when new, you might not be surprised that this thing was completely loaded, even by modern standards.

I think you will still be blown away by all this thing has to offer in the cabin.

Now, obviously this thing isn’t so old that it doesn’t have the basics; climate control, cruise control, yadda yadda. Here we are going to talk about the standouts, starting with the comfort/luxuries first…

Firstly, and most important for my wife, we have heated seats. But not just any heated seats, we have 5 levels of heat in the front AND back.

included in the back seat, next to the 5 levels of heated seat adjustment is also a cigarette lighter. This covers all our bases, because if our daughter is more like my wife and is obsessed with being warm, she has all the heat at her finger tips.

Alternatively, if our daughter is more like me and is cool as hell, she has a cigarette lighter at her disposal*.

(*I unfortunately am not, in fact, cool enough to smoke cigs. I do aspire to be cool enough that people think I maybe could be a cigarette smoker though)

Moving on.

Another favorite creature comfort of mine: GLOVEBOX COOLER

No need to waste space bringing your own cooler simply to house your family’s sandwiches for your 4 hour drive. Just toss them in the glove box, next to your frosty car manual, registration/insurance cards, $2.62 cents in change, and other various mostly trash items you haven’t laid eyes upon in 18 months that will continue residing in the compartment of your car that has NEVER, and will NEVER actually house gloves.

Recession Era Luxury Number 3: MONSTER sun roof, with more adjustment precision than a top end laz-e-boi:

FOUR: Parking sensors + Max is pretty confident he could install a backup cam.

The parking sensors in this are pretty early, and are certainly not the 3D, top down, 4k resolution parking assistant we have in cars today.

But its simple, and it worked.

FIVE: You don’t even need to open the whole tailgate, you can just open the rear glass.

Practicality-wise, this thing is just a damn solid SUV.

Even the performance-oriented Turbo S doesn’t have anything too scary to worry about maintenance-wise. Apparently the 4.5 V8 runs into cylinder scoring issues, and anything pre-2009 will have rubber coolant lines in the valley of the V8 that go bad.

That’s why we are looking at this 2009 Turbo S though - they bumped the V8 to a 4.8 where the cylinder scoring is less of an issue, and they replaced the shaky coolant lines with metal ones.

Gas mileage: isn’t great, but isn’t awful. 19mpg. That said, my mentality on this is that whatever additional gas we burn being under the modern standards of 30+ mpg probably PALES in comparison with the energy spent building you a new car.

I am of the entirely reasonable mind that all used cars are green - they’re effectively recycled. The logic is sound, we don’t need to hyper-analyze it.

Even the complicated air suspension system (which we will talk more about soon) tends to be rock solid - rarely leaking or needing replacement.

This all said, it is a german performance suv nearing 20 years old. We’d be stupid not to assume there will be some deferred maintenance items, so I’ll be tacking on a bit to the purchase price to prepare for those when we price this thing out.

THE ANTI-EMASCULATION FACTOR

How’s this car going to prevent me from ever getting stuck in a ditch, or stuck on ice in my driveway, or in need of transportation without which I would’ve had to Uber my newborn daughter home from the hospital?

ANSWER: the buttons in that yellow circle in the pic, obviously.

What do they do? Let’s walk through them, left to right (this isn’t Australia).

On the left we have the controls for the differential & 2-speed transfer case (i.e. high (for normal street driving) & low range (for climbing, crawling, other slow-speed gremlin activities when you need POWER but not SPEED).

One click down on the left puts you in low range, and two clicks lock the center diff.

Why TF does locking the diff matter? Let me tell ya!

When you lock your center differential, you effectively lock the front and rear driveshafts, such that they rotate at the same speed. This splits your engine’s torque 50/50 between the front and ass end of your rig.

This matters because with an open (not locked) diff, when one wheel loses traction and can spin freely, the power from your engine will follow the path of least resistance (the tire that lost traction). When your power is going to the wheel without traction, you’re stuck.

By locking your diff, you ensure all wheels receive power from the engine regardless of traction, thereby improving your vehicle’s ability to deal with low-traction surfaces like snow, ice, sand, mud, etc. Max’s education corner COMPLETE.

So being able to lock your diff in an all-wheel drive car is a huge factor in its ability to handle shaky conditions.

ON THE RIGHT of the above image, we have Porsche’s air suspension control. You can literally flip a switch to raise or lower your Cayenne’s suspension.

Raise it if you’re driving through snow, sand, & mud. Lower it if you want to look coooooool (or have a lower center of gravity and stiffer suspension for performance-oriented road driving).

Granted, I don’t think you can raise and lower it as fast as the modern mercedes bouncy-cars, but this is still super handy.

Now, you might be wondering why a Porsche SUV that doesn’t look much different than the luxury mall-crawlers of modern day has so many serious off-road features, especially in a twin-turbo v8 that could get to 60 faster than most sports cars of its day.

The reason is simple: the luxury SUV market was pretty fresh when this (the first) generation of Cayenne came out. BMW kind of started the party in 2000, Porsche’s Cayenne came out in 2003. No one really knew what people cared about in their German luxury SUV’s yet.

Other manufacturers tried to guess what the people wanted. Porsche decided to just give its buyers everything.

The performance to match a Mustang GT500 in a drag race,

The amenities to make a penthouse suite at the Four Seasons take notes,

And the capability offroad to contend with a modern Ford Raptor.

Honestly, these things are so incredible as a do-everything platform that companies like Eurowise are building an entire aftermarket ecosystem to help shepherd these rigs to the top of the overlanding (off-roading on often multi-day trips to remote areas) zeitgeist.

An automotive niche historically occupied by hyper-customized Land Cruisers, Jeeps, & G-Wagons has been invaded in the last few years by Porsche’s SUV magnum opus; the all-rounder in leather-wrapped comfort BEAST of an SUV.

All this to say: I don’t think I’d get stuck on a patch of ice in my own driveway again.

BUT DOES IT FIT IN THE BUDGET?!

Short-answer? Ohhhhhh yeah. The Cayenne Turbo S pictured throughout this post sold on BringATrailer last year. The price?

$17,000. For a 550hp, V8, BEAUTY.

Only 115k miles too, not too shabby.

Let’s actually price this out though, as our rule is $1700/mo or less total, including both cars.

Using the MaxFindsCars Calculator…

we come in right around half our total budget. Now notably, I did add about $5k to the purchase price to account for maintenance items off the bat, just to be safe.

Anyways, now that we know how much it would cost, lets do…

THE FINAL RATING

• MAX METER: 9/10. The vibes of a recession era super suv are, as the kids would say, immaculate. I love the look, feel, and sound of this thing. It’s aging gracefully too.

• COMFORT: 8/10. Comfortable suspension, cushy leather seats, and all the amenities 2009 had to offer. Not quite up to modern standards, but damn close.

• PRACTICALITY: 5/10. An aging Porsche, especially a twin-turbo V8 Porsche, is nothing to shake a stick at. Will this car need preventative maintenance? Sure. Do you have to hope its nothing catastrophic? Yeah. But all intel on these old Cayenne’s seems to indicate they are about as reliable as you can expect a German car of this era to be. Middle of the road on this seems reasonable.

• ANTI-EMASCULATION FACTOR: 8/10. Extremely capable, but does look a bit suburban soccer-mom.

• BUDGET-FRIENDLY? 5/10. Literally half our budget, so it gets a nice half rating.

which means our total is… (drum roll please)

35/50, which puts the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S at the very TOP of our TWO CAR SOLUTION🎺🎉😤 LEADERBOARD.

Granted, its the only car on the leaderboard currently, but still… I feel this is a strong start.

If there were more Turbo S’s for sale right now, I may have needed to self-admit to solitary confinement to prevent myself from pulling the trigger.

In fact, if the owner of the Cayenne (VIN WP1AC29PX9LA81901) we were looking at in this post is reading this… hmu. Slide in my DM’s big dog.

And remember…

MaxFindsCars.com is not, technically, free! By subscribing, dear reader, you have agreed to tell your friends about it.

In fact, I believe the contract specifically stated you had to each subscribe 100 of your closest friends, colleagues, enemies, exes, priests, pets, & sugar mommas. I’ll have to check the fine print to be sure, but you all may as well get started spreading the word in the meantime.

That's a wrap for today. And if you want more MaxFindsCars, be sure to follow Max’s Twitter (@maxjzin)

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