How To Fix Your Instrument Cluster For Free

Oh, Porsche. You so crazy.

A trawl through Google showed that plenty of 996-generation Porsches eventually suffered from frozen pixels or a pixellated display. Nobody seemed to know what caused it or how to fix it. A search for replacement instrument clusters didn’t turn up anything terribly affordable, and it didn’t help that most of them were white-faced gauges instead of the black faces that came standard on the Anniversary car.

What to do? I thought long and hard about what might have caused the issue. Porsche painted the negative terminal on my Boxster with red paint, so at least twice I’ve blown out the fuse in the radio jump-starting the car, but this wasn’t the case for this spring. The only thing I’d done was run it when it was a little cool — forty-nine degrees, as you can see.

It made sense that the prehistoric Porsche LCD might have frozen or locked the pixels when activated in “cold” weather. Forget, for a moment, the fact that you’d put your fist through the dashboard if your Ford Focus or Chevy Cruze behaved this way. Porsches made it to the top of the Consumer Reports survey because nobody drives them and when they do they assume the problems are their own fault because they are nouveau trash who don’t know who to operate a fine Finnish convertible.

If cold weather was the fault, perhaps hot weather could be the cure. So, while I was traveling I left the Boxster to sit outside in ninety-degree heat for a week with the windows up. Any dog in there would surely have died a thousand deaths and in fact I bet the leather seats aren’t too happy about it. But when I returned and fired it up — voila!

After a few weeks away, it was nice to put the top down, put on my Paradise Valley straw hat, and drive downtown to hang out a bit. I really felt like the carefree old guys you always see in Boxsters. Sometimes I think I’ll sell this thing. Sometimes I think I’ll keep it. For now, my doubts have vanished like frozen pixels in the summer sun.