Having bought two other Porsches in my life, I had never thought too much about Certified Previously Owned cars until I bought a 2001 911 C2 Cabriolet under the CPO program last year from a major Porsche dealer. Although I knew in my marketing heart that CPO was really little more than a marketing ploy and a reason to increase the sales price, I bought the car.

Within the first year, the entire GPS, audio monitoring system, display, etc, known as the PCM (Porsche Communications Management), died. When this system goes, there is no radio, CD player, GPS, computer information. So, it had to be replaced.

The cost to replace it was roughly $5000.

The shock to me was that it was not covered under the warrantee that came with the certified sale. Surprise, surprise.

As I probed deeper and deeper into the nuances of Porsche's misleading and vague warrantees, I found that there is a great deal that the company says they will not cover, no matter what the "Certified" label implies. Certainly, it was not a long logical reach to assume that such a major and costly system would be under the warrantee.

 Reading the original new car warrantee revealed that the PCM wasn't a named item on that document either. I was told by one dealer, (not the one who sold me the car and repaired it), that "there are a lot of things that are not covered in the buyers copy of the warrantee, but are in the dealers' copy." This sounds suspicious, if not illegal and certainly unethical.

I also found that Porsche must take back the old system and will not give it to the customer, so it's very hard to get a handle on exactly what failed or went wrong or if, in fact, they even really replaced the broken one. The warrantee does say that all removed parts are Porsche property, which means to me that I really don't own the car at all, or at least not some of the key parts. For all I know, they tweaked the original system and put it back in, meanwhile charging me $4000+ for the replacement, rebuilt system, $300 for overnight shipping of the  replacement parts, sales tax, installation charges, etc, etc. None of this was covered by the warrantee.

The unhappy ending was that I howled long enough and loud enough to everyone in the Porsche sales and service chain to eventually get a portion of my costs refunded. I was in the process of buying a Cayenne at the time and dropped that deal quickly.

Research since then has shown that the CPO deal is not a good deal and that one would be better off paying less, having one's own mechanic go over the car from top to bottom before completing the sale and picking up a comprehensive extended warrantee instead, (after getting the entire text of the warrantee and reviewing it with a fine toothed comb....because most of these are full of holes as well).

In essence, the CPO is a way to move used cars. Simply that. It is not a buyer protection plan nor a wise investment, as far as the warrantee is concerned. Dealers inspect the car and it has to meet certain criteria to get into the plan. They replace things like worn tires and wiper blades, detail and clean the car. The CPO sales documents are impressive and it takes a lot of digging to actually find out exactly what degree of protection the buyer gets.