I've heard that the Warranty gets voided when you spend more than 1 hour into redzone - that there's a meter within the car that measures the accumulated time spent over the redline.

Can anyone substantiate this?

 

A DME scan will detect any engine over rev history . As fir warranty being voided .. if a driver carelessly blows his engine resulting from an improper shift then he is out of luck. A level 5 or 6 over rev would reveal that.

 

Question.....Doesn't the rev limiter kick-in to prevent that? (I'm more taking about the shift that someone "waits too long for" versus the accidental missed shift)

 

Not on down shifting

 

It is a tricky question as red zone starts from 7000rpm and you most definitely do not shift up before you cross into this zone.

DME zone 1 starts from 7300 rpm which is 3 notches in to red zone. Do they register 7100 and 7200 rpms time? who knows.

 

I have a 2006 997 Carrera. On the upshift, page 164 of the owner's manual says shift BEFORE the red line. If you shift after the red line you haven't followed Porsche recommeded practice and you could be busted. On the downshift, maximum RPMs for sixth to fifth are about 5,700, for fifth to fourth about 5,900, for fourth to third about 5,500, for third to second about 4,800 and for second to first about 4,000. I worked this out on the basis of a car with 18" rear tyres and attach a shift chart. Prior to my 997 i had an italian car. In my first few weeks of 997 ownership i had quite a few unintended excursions into the red zone. Three reasons for this; (i) the redline is lower than the italian, (ii) the Porsche engine is quieter, and (iii) the pitch tone of the Porsche exhaust is lower, which leads you to beleive that the engine is turning slower than it actually is. I needed to adapt my driving style to the Porsche and now find that, because of its realtively flat torque cirve, there's actually little to be gained from revving it too hard. I do however wait my next service with baited breath as the redline busts will have been recorded.

 

Manual says a lot of wise words. After modding, tuning and ECU flashing my cars` rpm cutt-off is at 7500 rpm, my max power now is at 6835 rpm at forth gear with nice almost flat upper section from 6K until 7100 (and that`s where car really wakes up) and then starts dropping sharp at 7150, so when I push it at event I shift it up usually at 7100-7200 on 1st gear but i can miss it easily and go up to 7300+, 7100-7200 something at second and then as I feel fit as it easier to control. But when you floor it on 1st gear no way you can catch exact right moment without going into high "red zone" every time considering red zone is any 7K+ revs. I guess with time it will accumulate way more than 1 hour of those.

 

How could one spend an hours over redline??? Once in awhile you might hit the rev-limiter, or on a downshift even get an overrev. But running the car at reline for an hour? Sounds kind of crazy to me. I don't hink you can hit the rev-limiter in 6th gears, and if you are in 5th or lower and at the redline why would you not shift ot a higher gear.

The ECU keeps track of ignitions on overrevs, not time.

 

well, I assumed automatically that total number of ignitions at known RPM is actually a time metric and as soon as you got 1 hour worth of `em - then you`re in trouble.

If this 1 hr info is true to begin with.

 

I've heard about it from someone who used to work for Porsche... He just advised me not to redline too many times. Should be alright for the odd late gear changes but apparently there are some who enjoy staying within that redline - cutoff point zone all the time...I just wanted to know whether Porsche would actually invalidate their warranty whether it's 1 hour or 10 minutes...

 

Recently

 

only thing I was told by a service manager was - if, say, you come to us with broken crankshaft for an example and we read DME and see that at this moment of failure engine was running, say, at 9K rpm - then it will not be covered by warranty as this is a definition of a user caused damage. i never asked if they have cumulative statistics about total time in red zone and was not told this as well.

 

recently my engine was blown and they did not cover it because they said i was in the red line too much!!! my question is why do we spend so much money to get cars that brake when you push them?? it is not as if my car was driven in race track but nevertheless isnt it Porsche well known of its reliability?? personally after five years of experience Porsche engines are much worse that Ferrari-Lamborghini engines. The ferrari i have hasnt got a single mechanical problem up to now and it is being driven much harder! The porsche within five years has changed 2 engines and much much more and the reply was that it was factory problem and changed under guarantee!!
Reliability is a myth!! they just have a good way of dealing with it. I do not know about other countries but in greece the distributor is a joke. They havent got a clue how the car works!just wonder ..they could not even pass the km status on a new instrument cluster!!! They are just learning how to speak english as well!!! it is sooooo funny that they had a english-Greek dictionary to translate!!

 

I try to upshift at about 6500 rpm if I am pushing the car. I always take note of the maximum speeds in each gear when downshifting at higher rpms. Finally, my shfts are deliberate two-step shifts. I feel this minimizes my causing damage to the engine even though it might be too conservative for some. The only sure way to prevent over reving the engine is to go with an automatic.

 

The DME also records the "operating hour" for the over-rev, and I suspect that the OP is confusing the meaning of operating hour in his reference to hours in his post.