Porsche Lemon Nets Owner $266k—and the 911

The service advisor explained that the computer did not find any error codes, so there couldn’t be anything wrong

by John Deaneas

Wisconsin attorney Bruce Tammi was a car guy from when he was a kid. His all-time favorites were Porsches, and he owned two of them—a 1978 911 Turbo and a 1999 Carrera. But one night his barn took a direct hit by lightning, and the resulting fire destroyed both Porsches.

Armed with an insurance settlement, Bruce leased a new, $133,000 2003 Turbo from one of the three Wisconsin Porsche dealers. He thought it an awesome car, but it developed an annoying glitch. Intermittently, after the rear spoiler had deployed at about 70 mph, Bruce would hear a loud whistling sound, and the dash light indicating a spoiler control failure would come on. Manual control wouldn’t help. The only way to correct the situation was to pull over, shut the engine down, remove the key from the ignition, then restart the motor. The occurrences became more frequent.

He...

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