Compared to what? A Toyota Corolla? Higher performance requires higher maintenance for any brand. In motorsport you will be frequently replacing parts as they are pushed to the limit.
Compare a Porsche 911 versus Corolla on a track and see which one is actually more reliable after 20 hard laps.
Exactly... you can't compare the reliability of a street legal track ready race car with a cheap economy car. Compared to other exotic cars with similar performance, the longevity and reliability of Porsche is unequaled... and with proper maintenance they handle decades of hard driving.
Most people dont drive these cars on tracks. They drive them in cities and motorways, which in Europe force you to drive the same way you’d drive a Corolla. It’s not just mechanics that lack. Plastics come off and have nothing to do with track driving. The spyder or the 981 equally suffer from roofs and door panels simply ungluing. Mechanics are as bad as the Cayenne’s engine blows up just by looking at it. All in all the myth is gone, these cars are not what used to be. Well the porschea boxster and cayman were infamous for ims issues, oil leaks, and various other non essential mechanics failing. Marketing is one thing, real life is another.
A performance car doesn't magically get reliable just because you drive it slow- usually the opposite actually, you get carbon buildup issues, timing chain wear issues, etc. if a motor engineered for high RPM reliability is driven gently, or worse, lugged frequently at low RPMs.
I mentioned IMS issues elsewhere in this thread, but I think you're also being disingenuous with the Cayenne.
The Cayenne is a pretty darn impressive vehicle- a full sized SUV that handles well enough to be fun on a race track, and yet also does incredible offroad. It has a lot of engine options, and while some of the earlier high performance V8 engine options had issues, most of them are very reliable. It does pay for all of that performance and capability by being pretty complex, but it's also very well built. As the older Cayennes have become cheap, there's a big following now of people doing serious offroading in them, and the suspension, body, and interiors really hold up well to hard offroad use.
I would say Porsche engines tend to have new design flaws when they do a ground up engine redesign cycle, because they are really pushing the limits with new ideas and tech, and they get reliable again after a few years. Most other car companies pretty much avoid doing that, or doing it as often, because they aren't trying to extract as much performance.
There are some segments of autobahn in Germany where there is no speed limit. There are many segments where there is a speed limit, varying from 80 mph to 60 mph, especially in or near cities where most people live. There are many segments where there is dense traffic or road construction. You can't just speed through those areas at 160 mph while shouting "out of my way, peasants!"
But realistically it doesn't mean that an average Porsche owner does nothing but speeding on Autobahns. Similarly lots of people in the US drive pickups but only a tiny portion of them actually use them the way they were meant to be used
If they ever built a car more reliable than the 981/991 generation, I don't know what it is. They were regularly beating Lexus on quality surveys at that time.
What was your experience, and with what model(s)? Sounds like you got burned.
Counterpoint: Porsches are notoriously horrible in 24 hours of lemons. These are mostly 924, 944 and boxsters.
For 18+ hours of w2w racing I'd take the Corolla.
In any case, apples and oranges. Porsche seems to build reliable stuff compared to their actual competitors which are Ferrari, Lotus, etc etc. Toyota comparisons are meaningless.
I'm not very familiar with the Corolla specifically, but most modern regular cars don't have enough cooling capacity for the engine or brakes, to be driven flat out, and the oil supply systems can starve the engine of oil if driven at max cornering on a long sweeping curve. All of those issues can pretty much cause immediate failures if taken on a track, even in a well built car that isn't designed to be used like that. There are probably simple aftermarket solutions that do prepare a Corolla for reliable track use but you would likely at a minimum need different engine oil, brake fluid, and brake pads... whereas any Porsche model will be factory spec'd with fluids and consumables suitable for track use.
Look at this for example:
Porsche 986 Boxster S front brake rotor: 318 mm x 28 mm
Toyota Corolla AE101R front brake rotor: 238 mm x 22 mm
You have massively larger brakes on the Porsche... and many Corollas even have ancient drum brakes on the rear, which can barely dissipate enough heat for normal non-track driving. The Corolla will boil it's brake fluid on the track, and the pedal will go soft which is extremely dangerous.
Late 80s early 90s Corollas were very popular first track day cars in Australia and New Zealand. A standard AE92 Corolla FX-GT will happily go on a track day as long as it has fresh brake fluid. I've done it!
