Steven Chen - Web nerd, entrepreneur, amateur racer

My sister-in-law and her husband were due in town this weekend and asked if we had a spare vehicle to borrow for their trip up to Napa. I, of course, had the perfect vehicle for them. One with no parking sensors, no backup cameras, terrible gas mileage, a blown amplifier, and a dying battery. Hey, the wireless CarPlay still works brilliantly.

I had been putting off replacing the battery in our 2006 Cayenne S for a while. I only drive the vehicle occasionally and it was consistently needing a trickle charge between drives, the symptoms being that the car would show a "Four wheel drive system faulty warning" error at startup. Porsche's brilliant engineers decided the best place to put the battery is under the driver's seat. Because you vitally need to optimize the handling of the ultra-sporty 5,000lb family hauler </sarcasm>.

Most things I do end up being JBOT instead of JIT, that is, just-barely-on-time instead of just-in-time. I ordered a Mighty Max AGM off of Amazon which I have used in other cars and it was set to arrive the night before the job. "Perfect timing!" I thought. Naturally, Amazon missed the scheduled delivery. The app said they would try again the next day but our guests were landing in the morning and driving up to Napa right away not 4:45pm to 8:45pm. Left with a few hours before their flight I figured it was time for a Costco Interstate battery.

The "base" V6 Cayenne takes an H7 battery. The V8 S and Turbo models take an H8 battery with many owners opting for an H9 for extra amp hours and CCAs. This is all fine and dandy until you realize the previous owner put an H7 in the car and the H9 is out of stock at Costco.

Lessons learned:

Never trust the previous owner's mechanic.
Costco still has the best battery prices.
I will probably always be JBOT instead of planning ahead.

Armed with a 10mm triple square socket (because why would you use a normal bolt head?) I got to work. The install was straight-forward other than gorillaing the massive batteries out of the barely large enough openings. I would have loved to have put the H9 AGM in but apparently the positive battery cable is different so I may have run in to issues there as well.

For future reference that longer battery cable is Porsche #95561209010 available at FCP Euro at time of publishing for $46.69.