I’ve Been Saying This for Years But You Keep Buying These Engines

today i'm going to talk about why it's not a good idea to put a small four-cylinder turbocharged gdi engine in a big vehicle like a ford explorer and why you shouldn't buy one that has that engine in it in the first place now as we look under the hood you can see it's got a tiny engine a very tiny engine with a lot of crap on it it's a four-cylinder two-liter turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine in a vehicle that's a pretty big size vehicle what's the problem with this one it runs perfectly fine for a while especially in town turbo kicks in lots of power but then you take it on the highway get it going the turbo cuts out entirely it doesn't turbo charge at all you're just running it with no turbo and it's a dog then now my customer recently bought this vehicle he's a new customer if he was an old customer he probably wouldn't have bought it because he would ask me they would have told him not to buy it but he did buy it and he searched and found out that the turbo charger in this thing has already been replaced two times even though when you look inside it's only got 65 831 miles on it when you put the scan tool on because the check engine light's on it says p1016 wastegate pressure higher than expected now there's a technical service bulletin that you say you replace the control valve on it that's been done three times with ford parts didn't fix anything there's no vacuum links on it i checked my computer there's no software updates for them and the weird thing is it'll run perfectly normal for a while then get out on the highway no boost you can cruise all day long but when you try to accelerate it accelerates very slowly and when i had my computer hooked up i could see that there was no boost from the turbocharger boosting the engine so then you just had a little four-cylinder non-turbocharged engine pushing this big vehicle and weirdly enough if you shut the car off for a couple minutes start it back up it runs totally normal and has great boost until you get going faster on the highway and it starts all over again until you shut it off now this problem is one amongst many reasons i advise not to buy these big vehicles with little bitty turbocharged gasoline direct injection engines they are so complicated they have so much feedback from one system to another that can cause things to shut off now as i said this baby has already had two separate replacements of the turbocharger obviously it didn't fix it in the long run in the short run it did because it ran okay for a while but now it's doing it again now i'm not gonna be like the other guys and just throw a 1300 parts alone turbo charger on a thing there's many things that could give false feedback so the computer thinks there's an over boost and then doesn't allow the turbo charger to boost the system anymore so the first thing we're going to do is check the spark plugs we'll take this air duct off because it's in the way now we can access the spark plugs now we'll take the little bolt that holds the coil and plug off it's your magnet then we'll wiggle it and take it off then we'll get our ratchet and take out a spark plug and check it oh man that thing's in there solid if you can't succeed at first get a longer ratchet now we got a nice long one there we go broke loose now we'll take it out now believe it or not the spark plug firing the way these computer systems work they use a lot of measurements to see what kind of boost is happening and one of the parts that's used is the spark plug so these are the original ford spark plugs that are in this thing i'm going to change them out and see if it makes a difference we're going to pray it does because if it doesn't could very well need another expensive turbocharger so we got a box of four autolite spark plugs we're gonna put new ones in before we do that we wanna check the gap you can't trust these companies anymore i'll put this one in it's 32 it's supposed to be 28 we're gonna move it to 28. just tap a little on some metal then measure it again now it's 28 we checked the second one it's 28 it was made right we checked the third one it's 38. they really don't have much quality control so we got to tap this one too make it right it's measured now now it's 28. now i'll check the last one lo and behold that's 28.2 two of them were off one was off a whole bunch always check the gap these stupid things when they make them the quality isn't what it used to be check it if they're gapped differently it's not gonna run right so now we put the new ones back in stick them on the hole hard to find out oh there it is get a long ratchet because then it's easier to turn it i've already finger tightened it now huh it's nice and tight then of course we do the other three you got to do all four of them which they wouldn't make these threads so long makes it a royal pain taking them out and we'll do the third one long one comes in handy break some loose a lot easier and there goes number three the new one in coil back on and do make sure that when you connect the electrical connection here that it clicks when you push it in listen for it to click if it doesn't click it's not on tight listen if you listen closely you can hear there it goes click and now comes the last one number four put the last new one in and put the ignition coil back on top of it go fill it up with oil realize that these four-cylinder ecoboost engines have a tendency to burn oil as they age maybe it's only got 65 000 miles on it but it still will burn oil you want to check it every once in a while that can create problems too all right now we can put the air duct back on get ready to go and you want to get them nice and tight you don't want any air leaks and that's it now we're going to take it for road test and let's hope for the best even hoods don't close that good so start her up push the up button starts right up now he said when you restarted it anyways the turbo would work so there's the turbo it's working at low speeds now we're going to take it on a highway and see what happens so away we go stepping on the gas got some decent pickup the turbo's working let's see how long it lasts and here we go passing the trucks it's running really good now let's see if it holds up driving around for 15 20 minutes it's going now we're back home and voila it's still running like a clock there's a strange fix for you the turbocharger wasn't boosting the engine because the spark plugs were worn and it was giving wrong feedback and the engine was low on oil like i say these gdi engines the turbochargers very complicated all kinds of things can happen from computer software and interaction between the sensors here's a 2012 dodge charger that was made in canada now this is the one with the hemi engine the big v8 let's see how many miles it's got on 148 618 miles and you can't feel it but the engine's shaking and the check engine lights on well we're still going to deal with that but it's a classic muscle car type thing this isn't the loaded one but it's all black and dark it's got the charger mystique going to it but it's got a cracked window i think you don't see the side windows cracked as much but this is cracked now the front one yeah it's really cracked up you see that all the time not the greatest glass in the world oh it is a four-door muscle car there's plenty of room in the back and yes it's got ac ducts in the back too so it's not economy you get cool in the back too which of course you're gonna need with a black interior and we got on the back open a trunk and they also have the battery in the back you got to make real sure that these are clean and tight because these have a tendency getting loose and having problems and it does have the horrible fake spare but they make everything cheap these days check out the original giant wheels they're in decent shape and we'll check under the hood this is the one everybody wants with the big hemi v8 this baby's got 370 horsepower about 380 pound feet of torque it's a powerful 5.7 liter v8 and yes it's a tremendous gas hog any way you look at it in town it's rated at 16. last time i drove one of these i got about 10 because i drove it hard now this particular one it's not the all-wheel drive version it's rear-wheel drive big engine up front transmission in the middle and rear-wheel drive now this baby's got a five-speed chrysler-made automatic transmission which has many problems as they age unfortunately this is the cheaper version because back in 2012 the fancy chargers had the zf austrian 8 hp 8 high performance 8-speed transmission the same design that's in the new toyota supra completely different transmission there many of the modern chargers 2020 up they have the zf 8-speed transmission which is a super expensive transmission to fix when it breaks but they're not known for breakage they can take a tremendous amount of horsepower for example in the year 2017 zf sold 3.1 million zf 8 hp automatic transmissions but this thing's got the chrysler 5 speed which isn't the greatest if you're going to buy a car like this you need to do a bunch of research find out what engine it has find out what transmission it has if this i would have had the zf8 speed this thing would be worth a lot more money than it is today sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference when you're buying a car say you like the looks of a charger but you're not an absolute maniac you'd forget this whole system and you buy one that has a v6 engine in it because they don't put out as much horsepower but there's less strain on the transmissions and from my experience they last a lot longer they get a little bit better gas mileage because they're a v6 but mainly they're generally going to outlast these hemi ones especially with the five-speed chrysler-made transmissions and they do so for two main reasons there's less power less strain things last longer and the guys that drive these like maniacs all want the big hemi v8 and they drive the heck out of them you buy a used one you often end up buying a used worn out car then but with the v6s not the power not the popularity either but you can get them a lot cheaper now let's take a listen to the motor now they make a lot of noise but you can hear that clacking that's not normal it sounds good at the back but not the front now at a minimum this thing has hydraulic lifter problems hopefully that's the only problem with this thing so we're gonna check it out with my scan tool so let's hook up the out scan tool and check her out away we go with my new scan tool people often ask me they want a good scan tool they found out that the 100 ones aren't good enough they don't want to buy a 4 000 one this particular one is about a 500 scan tool it's a maxicom mk808 so far hey it works pretty good there's a lot of stuff but it isn't thirty five hundred dollars it's five hundred dollars so far works good it auto read the vin i didn't have to type it in let's see if it picks the car out right it's decoding the vin doesn't throw up dodge charger yep that's right so now we're going to analyze it here we go it's scanning it found five volts in a power train scanning it pretty fast typical dodge it's eight years old it's got five six 7 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 23 fault codes but what we care about the most is the power train it's got a bunch of culture cylinder 2 misfire airflow ignition coil insufficient ionization emission coil 3 secondary circuit insufficient ionization looking at all this data and talking to the customer they have never changed the number two ignition coil so we're going to change the number two ignition coil and hope it helps now realize that won't get rid of the ticking i can tell by the noise the lifters are making noise but on this engine change the lifters is 7.2 hours of labor you're going to spend about a thousand smackers doing that plus the parts more money than the car's worth so we're going to try the coil you know take the stupid cover off we're going to change the number two well this is two four six eight so we'll change this one here so we squeeze the connector they're on tight because you really gotta squeeze them there one bolt it ten millimeter and if you can't see it there's another one hiding here of course it's in the way of everything there we go now we'll get the socket and spin it by hand and pull it out get that out of the way again out it comes then we'll check it make sure got the same connectors and everything that looks the same so we'll pop it back in the hole so it fits on the spark plugs customer already changed the spark plugs they tried that themselves and that didn't fix it and we'll bolt these back on start them first then once you start them you can tighten them up sure made long threads on this baby now we can finish the job here and the other side of course don't forget to plug the coil in or it won't fire at all yeah that's locked on then i put the stupid beauty cover on it doesn't really do anything but what the heck it came with it close the hood before we take it for a ride we're going to erase the code so so we just turn on the idiot lights not running and click erase codes ignition on an engine off yes and now it's going to reset stuff and it even checks it to make sure that it did we'll read it and see now there's no fault codes so that will start her up you can see the check engine lights off the air pressure tire monitoring warning system is on but what tech everything breaks on these old things now we'll take it for a good long ride it's still got some guts left to it not what it started with because as i said the lifters are still worn odds are the cams are still it's never gonna perform perfectly but we're gonna see if we got rid of that number two cylinder misfire by taking it on the highway it does still make a nice growl and truthfully it does ride like an old muscle car you feel every bump on the road things still got old shocks and struts on it we want to see if we can get rid of the misfire now we take it for a spin let's check the data out it's checking it out now it's got one fault we'll see what the fault that came back is as you can see even during that drive we still got a whole bunch of faults that have come back already yeah the car is electronically a junker but we're gonna see what's happening with the powertrain control module we'll read the codes and we still have a cylinder number two misfire and what does that prove that proves that my initial diagnosis by ear was correct it's still misfiring even though it has codes for the coil that's a bunch of bs the engine's physically worn out the lifters are worn and the cams are worn it's just not worth fixing you can see with this data which is the injector pulse widths of the cylinders they're all over the place because the computer is trying to compensate for a worn engine sometimes this thing is 2500 sometimes it goes down there we go 25 24 and then some of them down here i mean there even lower 21 they're moving all over the place because it's trying to compensate for the wear and the engine now that one went down to 1500 now it's going back up to 21 22 and this is all idling with my foot not on the gas the computer is doing it itself to try to compensate for wear to see now just idle in here it went from a pending misfire code to an active misfire code so basically as you can see this charger basically has a worn out engine now a customer bought a year ago wasn't a customer of mine and if you would have brought it to me i would have told them don't ever pay seven thousand dollars for that car it's not worth hardly anything because it's pretty well worn out this is a reason i tell people not to buy chrysler products they're not well made they do not hold up over time it's not like this is a dinosaur it's eight years old and what i showed you was a running problem that makes it misfire in cylinder number two there's a ton more electronic problems that i haven't even analyzed yet and i'm not gonna bother because it's not worth it this vehicle as it stands would probably need a fully remanufactured engine more money than the cars worth but at least now you know the truth about dodge chargers now honda first got a name for itself when they started selling those 750 four-cylinder motorcycles when everybody else was making two cylinders they made a totally reliable fast non-oil leaking electric starting four-cylinder motorcycle the honda 750 they upset the motorcycle world because now they had motorcycles not only were fast but they were dependable they'd always start they wouldn't leak oil and they didn't need much maintenance now the first time they sold in the united states hey they had two cylinder air-cooled motorcycle engines in them then they started making better the ride the handling the engine like many other companies lately they began to slip in their quality though even today honda's the number one manufacturer four-stroke gasoline motors in the world their late model engines are starting to have some problems take a 2017 to 2018 honda crv they were pretty much the competition to the toyota rav4 both pretty good vehicles in the crvs they were putting a four-cylinder 1.5 liter turbocharged gdi engine in those things and they're having a problem with oil dilution issues honda came into that game rather late the gdi turbocharged little engine perhaps they should have waited a bit longer before they started selling them to the public and as with any other company they always try some bs software fix saying oh well the software isn't right we'll reprogram and they even went so far as telling people up north in canada to say well you know the problem is it's cold up there and you're not warming your engine up long enough so it's dumping too much fuel into the engine when it's cold and then the fuel's diluting the oil but when you think about it hey the old iron has never had that problem they didn't tell the canadians you're not warming your cars up enough i got friends in toronto they got it they just start them up and drive them into snow didn't have any problems with oil dilution so obviously this is a design flaw and oil dilution with gasoline is an insidious disorder it's not like you're gonna start the car it's gonna blow up and that's the end of it the gasoline gets in the oil doesn't lubricate all the bearings of the engine so the inside of the engine over time is gonna wear out faster this wear often occurs long after the warranty of the original factory warranty is over and if you keep your cars as long as i do you don't want an engine that's getting oil delusion that's going to wear out before it's time because they didn't design it right in the first place honda makes some of the best engines in the world they decided to throw gdi turbocharging and a little bitty 1.5 liter engine to get more horsepower so they go faster they messed up on that one heck volkswagen was one of the real early users of gdi and turbos and stuff and they do have all kinds of problems with carbon building up into the heads because the pcv system is getting oil and there's no cleaner going on the intake valves because the fuel system now pushes the fuel into the block of the engine and not on the intake where it'll be sucked in and actually clean the valves these same volkswagen designs did not have oil dilution problems gasoline getting into the engine oil and starting to make it lose its real lubrication properties now in some of these hondas you can even smell the gasoline in the oil and it can also lead to hesitation and stalling when it gets bad enough it'll overwhelm the computer systems and they don't know what to do how much fuel to mix with the air going to the engine when there is a lot of oil dilution now if you want to take it to an extreme case over the years i've had customers that had decent enough cars but they didn't change the oil enough some of them would go 15 18 000 miles so that oil was so dirty it actually made them fail emissions testing because it made the car pollute more by having dirty oil and this wasn't even particularly gasoline diluted oil you get really bad gasoline dilution on the oil not only is it wearing the engine but it's going to make your engine pollute more and i've seen cases where they won't pass the emissions test each year because of it now hilariously enough honda called this design earth dreams because of their fuel efficiency well their earth dream has kind of turned into an earth nightmare being highly efficient engines of which no one can argue these things are so efficient that it seems to take longer for the engines to warm up and as an engine's warming up guess what the computer commands the injectors to have more fuel and if it commands too much fuel then it'll get by the piston rings it'll start diluting the oil but as i've already said honda didn't have problems in their older engines like this it's just this new earth dreams thing where they went a little bit too far now honda's response to the soil dilution problem is that they're increasing the warranty of the car one extra year this oil dilution problem can take years to actually wear your engine out and they're giving you a measly extra year of warranty it goes from five years to six years if you drive a lot of mileage and you keep your car 10 20 years like me that's a spit in the bucket the warranty is just that oh if certain parts related to oil dilution where they'll replace the timing gear wears out or the camshaft wears out they should be forced to give you a brand new engine when they don't make the things right not oh we'll fix certain pieces if they go bad and if it's related to oil delusion problems any problem that deep who's to say if it was the chicken or the egg that came first and that they're going to actually fix your engine and say it was because of oil dilution in the beginning they denied that it was even a problem they just said warm your car up more often i think honda's giving people the short end of the stick on this one and honda's even recalled certain 2019 crvs because they say there's a bad weld on the gas tank system where the fuel vapor line goes in so you're going to smell fewer vapors you're going to notice while you're driving a car when you stop it and park it to me that's like oh maybe they're trying to cover up the smell of oil dilution coming out of the tail pipe by that one who knows but hey if one part of your engine is worn out because of oil dilution don't think the rest isn't close behind it's like i tell people if you get a car that's got eight fuel injectors on it and it's getting older and one of them goes bad changing that one maybe not such a hot idea unless you're planning on selling the car because the rest of them are old you're best to replace them in sets if your engine is worn inside because of oil dilution that one part is the only thing that's worn all kinds of other parts are going to be worn inside and a lot of these parts you can't even check them without tearing a whole engine apart because when they start making noise then it's too late when you rub up the engine here then it's too late everything's worn so unless your car's making horrible noises you're not going to know that the bearings are warning too early so then you might well ask how do you check the bearings on an engine well you got to drop the bottom of the engine you got to take all the piston rod caps off and then you got to look at them and measure them to see if they've got excessive wear i guarantee you honda's not going to be doing that now you go back three decades ago toyota and honda they were racing neck and neck for making the best cars in the world they were actually very close past couple of decades they had a lot of ac compressor failures they had ac compressors that they were just making cheaper clutch on the end of the ac compressor spins it spins the shaft and the shaft used to be real thick like your thumb then they decided let's make thinner shafts more like your little pinky and these things were breaking off and flying off while you're going down the road i had customers with them they'd say my air conditioning stopped working weird a noise they'd bring it to me and i'd look at the whole end of the compressor the shaft that goes into it and the clutch had flown right off they were just getting a little bit too cheap now there's a lot of pressure on the clutch when you push down on it to open it up so you can shift gears all these plastic things were breaking all over the place i'd seen old honda's hydraulics things are 25 years old and they still work these things are four or five years old the plastic was breaking and what happened they had to make a metal replacement for the stupid plastic part that they put on you had to pay for it sometimes engineering goes too far into making things cheap or in the case of their oil dilution trying to make a small engine put out a lot of horsepower yet get good gas mileage at the same time and then not properly testing them in the real world to see what's going to happen with these systems that was the whole thing that honda and toyota were known for they test stuff out before they sold it to the public i remember ages ago guys i knew in england they were driving fuel-injected hondas in england where here in the united states all the hondas had simple carburetors in them what was honda doing they were road testing all their fuel injection systems on the english the english were the guinea pigs and once they perfected that system they brought it over here and if you know anything about honda cars when they sold fuel-injected systems on the hondas in the united states they were pretty bulletproof you'd never see any real problems with the honda fuel injection system now i hope honda figures out what they did wrong and makes the new one better but hey it shouldn't have occurred in the first place and if you've been watching me you know that scotty's warned people for quite some time be leery about buying a small four-cylinder engine that has gasoline direct injection turbo charging in it you're straining that little engine and it's got enough strain already without having to add oil dilution problems into the mix so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell [Music] you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 1,242,150

Rating: 4.8617315 out of 5

Keywords: bad car engine, bad cars, bad cars to buy, bad engine, bad engine design, bad engines, buy engine, buying a car, car, car advice, car buying, car diy, car engine, car engine explained, car engine repair, car repair, car review, cars, cars to avoid, cars you should never buy, diy, dont buy a car, engine, never buy, never buy a car, never buy a car with this engine, never buy a used car, repair, scotty kilmer, worst cars, I've been saying this for years, engines, car engines

Id: vIUoCLEkl2s

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020