Oh well if that’s all.
Kinda crazy that GM has been making some version of that “small block” pushrod V8 since like the 1950s, and it’s still unreliable? The damned thing should be perfected by now, right??
Buy a Chev, you’ve bought the best!
You’ll drive a mile, then walk the rest...
It's time to ditch CAFE standards so we can have uncomplicated, reliable powertrains again.
All of this green crap they've forced automakers to embrace has resulted in lighter components that fail prematurely.
This could well end General Motors as a corporation. If what you build is unreliable, NOBODY will buy it.
They aren’t giving them loaners?
In the collector car market, number matching is a big thing.
Because of CAFE, they sacrifice a lot of reliability to save a little weight. It is insane. It is like building bridges with no safety margins.
Heck. Even Cubans can keep 70 year old rust buckets on the road.
Enough to make you go electric.
I have a friend who had a previous model Corvette Z06. He had a catastrophic engine failure. (One of the valve heads snapped off and dropped into the engine causing a rod to snap and “speed bag” the inside of the engine). Car had 30k on the clock. Still under warranty the dealer removes the engine, calls Detroit, they tell them to scope the cylinders and check the heads. Found the missing valve head. “That’s a known failure, replace the engine”. Well, when it went it blew shrapnel through everything. So the cats were shot, the radiator was shot, etc. Replaced everything under the hood other than the brakes.
Engine #2. Driving along, and it shuts off. Towed to the dealer, they call Detroit and get a directive to check the dry sump oil pump. It’s locked up. “That’s a known failure, replace the engine”. It’s under warranty, they do it for free. Would have been $14k had they not.
Engine #3. Driving along, and it shuts off. Towed to the dealer, they call Detroit and describe what they see. Detroit has NO IDEA what this failure is. “Replace the engine, and send the old one back to us for review”. They do that, and when he gets it back THIS time, he sells it.
He had had enough.
The problem seems to be in the top end (valve train) - lifter bearings or bad lifters.
GM has been trying to improve mileage by shutting down two or four cylinders in their V-8s when HP demand is low. Part of this scheme involves the fuel injection, but they also want to keep engine valves closed as well during shutdown. To do this they cut oil pressure to the lifters so they don't open the valves. When you tell the engine you want more power by stepping on the gas pedal, the fuel injection and oil pressure are supposed to be restored to the shut-down cylinders.
That's the way it's supposed to work. Apparently it doesn't, reliably.
A lot of gearheads who install these motors know this and immediately disable this feature. They'd rather buy a little more gas than take the risk.
Back about 1988.
Bought a new C70 Chevy for a fuel truck.
Engine blew at 9000 miles.
Chevy sent out a new engine.
It blew at 500 miles.
Chevy sent out a new engine.
It blew on the test drive.
I called the head of Chevy’s heavy truck division.
I told him,
“You’ve got a run of bad engines and you’re just farming them out to junkyards around the country, aren’t you?”
He said they were.
I told him I was going to sue them.
He told me,
“Go ahead. We’re GM. We’ll tie you up in court for years.”
Real customer orientation even back in the 80s.
And then those wonderful GM commercials during football games.
The AFM (active fuel management system) is killing these engines. It wipes the cam, lifters and rings out and spreads metal all through the oiling system in the name of “fuel economy”. Very fuel efficient to cast ans machine tons of new engines / not.
These idiots haven’t figured out internal combustion engines after over 100 years. Meaybe they should go back to the Olds Rocket or Chevy small block. They actually worked.
Reminds me of Honda’s problem with a manufacturing defect in their otherwise bulletproof 3.2L V6 engine back in the late 2010’s.
Sounds planned.
I’ll take “timing chains that look like bicycle chains” for 500, Alex.
I’m sure these car owners all have $3,000 just lying around.