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 large vehicle like a Ford Explorer and why you shouldn't buy one with that engine in the first place. Now when we look under the hood we can see that it has a small engine, a very small engine with a lot of junk, it's a two liter four cylinder turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine in a vehicle that is a fairly large sized vehicle . The problem with

this

one it works perfectly fine for a while especially around town the turbo makes a lot of power but then you get it on the highway, start it up, the turbo shuts off completely, it doesn't charge at all, it just you are executing. no turbo and it's a dog, so my client recently purchased

this

vehicle.

Is a new customer. If I was a long-time customer, I probably wouldn't have bought it because I would wonder. They would have told him not to buy it, but he did. bought it and looked it up and found out that the turbocharger on this thing had already

been

replaced twice even though when you look inside it only has 65,831 miles on it when you turn on the scan tool because the check engine light is on and it says p1016 fuel pressure wastegate higher than expected now there is a technical service bulletin

saying

replace the control valve that was done three times with ford parts didn't fix anything no vacuum links checked my computer no software updates for them and the strange thing is that it will run perfectly normal for a while and then hit the road with no boost, you can cruise all day 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 that powered the engine, so it just had a small non-turbocharged four-cylinder engine pushing this big vehicle, and interestingly enough, if you turn the car off for a couple of minutes, you turn it back on and it runs completely normal. and it has a lot of boost until you go faster on the highway and it starts again until you turn it off.

This problem is one of many reasons why I advise against

buying

these large vehicles with small turbocharged direct injection gasoline

engines

, they are so complicated, they have so much feedback from one system to another that it can cause things to shut down now, as I said , this baby already had two separate turbocharger replacements, obviously it didn't fix it long term, short term it did. because it worked well for a while, but now she's doing it again. I'm not going to be like everyone else and just throw a 1300 piece turbocharger into a thing. There are a lot of things that could give false feedback, so the computer thinks there's overboost and then it no longer allows the turbo charger to boost the system, so the first thing we're going to do is check the spark plugs, we're going to remove this passageway. air because it's in the way, now we can access the spark. spark plugs now we'll take the little bolt that holds the coil and disconnect it, it's your magnet, then we'll move it and remove it, then we'll take our ratchet, take out a spark plug and check it, oh man, that thing is inside. there it's solid, if you can't succeed at first get a longer ratchet, now we have a nice long one, here we go, it came loose, now we'll get it out, believe it or not, the spark plug fires the way they work these computer systems that they use.

A lot of measurements have

been

made to see what kind of boost is happening and one of the parts that is used is the spark plug, so these are the original Ford spark plugs that are in this thing. I'm going to change them and see if they work. difference, we are going to pray that it is, because if it is not, it is very possible that it will need another expensive turbocharger, so we have a box of four Autolite spark plugs, we are going to put new ones in before we do that, we want to check the gap.

I can't trust these companies anymore. I'll put this one at 32. It's supposed to be 28. We'll move it to 28. Just lightly touch some metal and then measure again. Now it is 28. We check the second. 28 was done well, we checked the third one, it's 38. They don't really have much quality control, so we have to take advantage of this one as well to get it right. It's measured now, now it's 28. Now I'll check the last one and Look, that's 28.2, two of them were off, one was off, a bunch, always check the spacing of these stupid things when they make them, the quality it's not what it used to be, check it if they are separated differently, it won't work now.

We put the new ones back in, we stick them in the hole with difficulty to discover, oh, there's a long ratchet there because then it's easier to turn it. I already tightened it with my fingers, eh, it's nice and tight, so of course we do the same. The other three you have to do all four and they wouldn't make these threads as long, it makes it a real pain to get them out and we'll do the third long one, one is useful, it releases some much easier and there it goes. number three, put the new one back on the coil and make sure when you connect the electrical connection here it clicks when you press it, listen for it clicks, if it doesn't click it's not tight, listen if you listen carefully.

I can hear it click and now comes the last number four. Put the last new one in and put the ignition coil back on top. Fill it with oil. Please note that these four-cylinder ecoboost

engines

have a tendency to burn oil. As they get older, it may only have 65,000 miles on it, but it will still burn oil. You should check it from time to time, that can also create problems. Now we can put the air duct back in, get ready to go. you want them to fit snugly, you don't want air leaks and that's it. Now we're going to take it for a road test and hopefully the tops don't close as tight, so start it up and push up.

The button starts right now, it said when you reset it anyway the turbo would work, so there's the turbo, it's running at low speeds. Now we're going to take it to a road and see what happens, so let's step on the accelerator. decent truck the turbo is running let's see how long it lasts and here we go passing the trucks it's running great now let's see if it can handle driving for 15 20 minutes it's working now that we're back home and that's it it's still running like clockwork there is a solution strange for you, the turbocharger was not boosting the engine because the spark plugs were worn and gave incorrect feedback and the engine was low on oil, as I say, these gdi engines, turbochargers are very complicated, all kinds of things can happen. from the computer software and the interaction between the sensors here is 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 has at 148,618 miles and you can't feel it, but the engine shakes and the check engine lights come on, we're still going to deal with it, but It is a classic muscle car, this is not the charged one, but it is all black and dark, it has the mystique of the charger, but it has a broken window, I think you can't see the side windows as broken, but this one is broken, now the front, yeah, it's really broken, you see that all the time it's not the best glass in the world, oh, it's a four-door muscle. car, there is a lot of space in the back and yes it also has air ducts in the back so it is not cheap, you also cool down in the back which of course you will need with a black interior and we have a open trunk in the rear. and they also have the battery in the back, you have to really make sure they are clean and tight because they tend to come loose and have problems, and it has a horrible fake replacement, but nowadays they make everything cheap, look at the original. giant wheels are in good shape and we will check under the hood this is the one that everyone wants with the big hemi v8 this baby has 370 horsepower about 380 pound-feet of torque it is a powerful 5.7 liter v8 and yes it is a tremendous gas Any way you look at it, in the city it is rated a 16.

The last time I drove one of these I got about a 10 because I drove it hard. Now this particular one is not the all wheel drive version, it has a big engine with rear wheel drive. front mid drive and rear wheel drive now this baby has a 5 speed automatic transmission made by Chrysler which has a lot of problems as they get older unfortunately this is the cheapest version because in 2012 the fancy chargers had the zf austrian 8 hp 8 high performance 8 speed transmission the same design that is in the new toyota supra completely different transmission many of the modern chargers from 2020 onwards have the zf 8 speed transmission which is a very expensive transmission to repair when it breaks but They are not known for breaking, they can take a huge amount of horsepower, for example, in 2017, ZF sold 3.1 million ZF 8 HP automatic transmissions, but this thing has the Chrysler 5 speed, which is not the best if you are going to buy a car like this you need to do a lot of research find out what engine it has find out what transmission it has if it had had the zf8 speed this thing would be worth a lot more money than it is today sometimes it's the little things the ones that make a big difference when you buy a car you say you like the look of a charger but you're not an absolute maniac you would forget this whole system and buy one that has a v6 engine because they don't produce as much horsepower but there is less stress on the transmissions and in my experience they last a lot longer, get a little better gas mileage because they are a v6, but mainly they will last longer than these hemis, especially with the five. -High speed transmissions made by Chrysler and they do it for two main reasons: there is less power, less stress, things last longer and the guys that drive them like maniacs all want the big hemi v8 and drive them a lot, you buy a used one.

I often end up

buying

a worn out used car, but with V6s neither the power nor the popularity either, but you can get them much cheaper now, let's listen to the engine. They make a lot of noise now, but you can hear that clicking sound. That's not normal, it sounds good in the back, but not in the front. Now, at the very least, this thing has problems with the hydraulic lift. Hopefully that's the only problem with this thing, so we'll check it with my scan tool, so let's plug in the output scan. tool and check it out let's go with my new scan tool people often ask me they want a good scan tool they found out that the 100 are not good enough they don't want to buy a 4 000 one this particular one is about a scan tool 500 is a maxicom mk808 so far it works pretty well there are many things but it doesn't cost thirty five hundred dollars it's five hundred dollars so far it works well it automatically reads the vin I didn't have to write Come in, let's see if you select the car correctly.

It is decoding the vin. He doesn't vomit. Dodge Charger. Yes that's how it is. Now let's analyze it. Here we go.. It's scanning. Five volts were found in a power train. Scanning it quite a bit. fast typical dodge is eight

years

old has five six 7 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 23 fault codes but what matters most to us is the power train it has a lot of crop failure in cylinder 2 air flow coil ignition insufficient ionization emission coil 3 secondary circuit insufficient ionization looking at all this data and talking to the customer, they have never changed ignition coil number two, so we are going to change ignition coil number two and we hope it helps now to realize that we won't get rid of The ticking I can tell by the noise that the elevators make noise, but in this engine change, the elevators are 7.2 hours of work.

You're going to spend about a thousand bucks on that, plus the parts, more money than the car is worth, so let's test the coil, you know, take the stupid cap off, let's change number two, well this is two four six eight, so we'll change this one here, so we tighten the connector, they're tight because I really have to tighten them there, a ten millimeter bolt and if you can't see it, there's another one hidden here, of course, it's in the way of everything . There we go, now we will take the bushing, we will turn it by hand and we will remove it. that out of the way again, we'll go over it and make sure it has the same connectors and everything looks the same, so we'll put it back in the hole to fit the spark plugs.

The customer already changed the spark plugs. They tried it themselves and that didn't fix it and we're going to screw them back on, start them first and then once you start them you can tighten them. Make sure there are long threads on this baby, now we can finish the work here and on the other side. of course don't forget to plug in the coil or it won't fire at all, yeah it's locked and then I put the stupid beauty cover on it, it doesn't really do anything but what the hell does it come with? She closes the hood before. we take it for a spin, we're going to clear the code, so we just turn on the idiot lights that don't work and click clear codes, ignition on a dead engine, yeah, and now it's going to reset things and it even checks it formake sure. that he did it, we will read it and see that now there are no fault codes, so he will start it.

You can see the check engine lights off, the tire pressure monitoring warning system is on, but what technology? Everything is broken in these old things now. I'll take it for a good ride, it still has some guts left in it, it's not what it started with because like I said the lifters are still worn out, the cams are most likely still there, it'll never run perfectly but we'll see if we get there . get rid of that number two cylinder misfire when you take it on the road, it still makes a nice growl and honestly it drives like an old muscle car, you feel every bump in the road, things still have old shocks and struts, we want to see if we can get rid from them. the misfire now we test it let's check the data it's checking it now it has a fault we'll see what the fault is that came back as you can see even during that trip we still have a bunch of faults that have already come back yeah the car is electronically a junker, but we're going to see what's going on with the powertrain control module, we're going to read the codes and we still have a misfire on cylinder number two and what does that prove that proves that my initial?

The ear diagnosis was correct, it still fails even though it has codes for the coil which are a bunch of nonsense. The engine is physically worn out. The lifters and cams are worn. It's just not worth fixing. You can see with this data which is the injector. the cylinder pulse widths are all over the place because the computer is trying to compensate for a worn engine sometimes this is 2500 sometimes low there we go 25 24 and then some of them down here I mean even lower 21 they are getting moving all over the place because it's trying to compensate for wear and tear and the engine now that one went down to 1500 now it's going back up to 21 22 and this is all at idle with my foot not on the accelerator what the computer is doing just to try to offset wear to see now just idle here 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 it a anus.

I'm a client of mine and if you had brought it to me I would have told them to never pay seven thousand dollars for that car, it's worth almost nothing because it's pretty worn out, this is one reason I tell people not to do it. buy chrysler products they are not well made they do not last over time it is not like it is a dinosaur it is eight

years

old and what I showed you was a malfunction that causes cylinder number two to fail there are many more electronic problems that I have not even analyzed yet and I'm not going to bother because it's not worth it, this vehicle as is would probably need a completely remanufactured engine, more money than the cars are worth, but at least now you know the truth about Dodge Chargers.

Honda first made a name for themselves when they started selling those 750 four cylinder motorcycles, when everyone else was making two cylinders, they made a four cylinder motorcycle with electric start, fast and no oil leaks, totally reliable, the Honda 750 , they disrupted the motorcycle world because they now had motorcycles that were not only fast but reliable, always started, didn't leak oil, and didn't need much maintenance now, the first time they were sold in the United States, they had two-stroke motorcycle engines. air cooled cylinders. in them they began to improve engine handling and handling, like many other companies, lately they began to lose quality, although even today Honda is the number one four-stroke gasoline engine manufacturer in the world, their latest engines model are starting to have some The problems take a honda crv 2017 to 2018.

They were practically the competition of the toyota rav4. Both pretty good vehicles in the CRVs. They were putting a 1.5 liter four cylinder turbocharged gdi engine in those things and they are having a problem with oil dilution. Problems: Honda got into that game pretty late, the little GDI turbocharged engine, maybe they should have waited a little longer before they started selling them to the public and like every other company they always try some bs software solution

saying

, well , the software does not. right, we'll reschedule it and they even went so far as to tell people in northern Canada to say well you know the problem is it's cold there and you're not warming up the engine long enough so you're pouring too much fuel into the motor. when it's cold and then the fuel dilutes the oil, but when you think about it, hey, old iron never had that problem, they didn't tell the Canadians that you're not warming up your cars enough.

I have friends in Toronto, they got it. just starting them and driving them in the snow had no problem with oil dilution so obviously this is a design flaw and oil dilution with gasoline is an insidious mess it's not like you're going to start the car but it will explode and that en In the end, the gasoline that goes into the oil does not lubricate all the engine bearings, so over time the inside of the engine will wear out faster. This wear and tear often occurs long after the original factory warranty ends and if you

keep

your cars as long as I do.

You don't want an engine that has an illusion of oil that will wear out prematurely because they didn't design it right in the first place. Honda makes some of the best engines in the world. They decided to add GDI turbocharger and a small 1.5 liter engine to get more horsepower and thus go faster. They were wrong about that. Volkswagen was an early adopter of gdi and turbos and stuff, and they have all kinds of problems. with carbon building up in the heads because the pcv system is getting oil and there is no cleaner on the intake valves because the fuel system is now pushing the fuel into the engine block and not into the intake where it will be sucked in and actually clean the valves.

These same Volkswagen designs did not have oil dilution problems. Gasoline enters the engine oil and begins to cause it to lose its actual lubricating properties. Now on some of these Hondas you can even smell the gasoline in the oil and you can drive too. to hesitate and stop when things get bad enough, you will 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 will. Take it to an extreme case over the years, I have had customers that had pretty decent cars but they didn't change the oil enough, some of them had 15,18,000 miles on them, so the oil was so dirty that it actually made them fail emissions tests. because it made the car pollute more by having dirty oil and this was not even a particularly diluted oil with gasoline, you get a very bad dilution of gasoline in the oil, it not only wears out the engine but it will make your engine pollute more and I have seen cases where they fail the emissions test every year because of that.

Now, quite amusingly, Honda called this design earth dreams because of its fuel efficiency. Well, their terrestrial dream has become a kind of terrestrial nightmare as they are highly efficient engines of which no one. I can argue that these things are so efficient that it seems like the engines take longer to warm up and as an engine warms up guess what the computer orders the injectors to have more fuel and if it orders too much fuel then it will go through the The piston rings will start to thin the oil, but like I said, Honda didn't have problems like this in their older engines, it's just this new earth dream they went too far now.

Honda's response to soil dilution. The problem is that they are increasing the car warranty by another year. This oil dilution problem can take years to wear out the engine and they are giving you a measly extra year of warranty; it goes from five years to six years if you drive high mileage and

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 will replace, the timing gear wears out or the camshaft wears out, You should be forced to give it a new engine when they don't do things right, no, oh we will fix certain parts if they break down and if it is related to oil illusion problems, any problem so deep who can say if it was the chicken or the egg that came first and they are actually going to fix your engine and say it was due to oil dilution at first they denied it was even a problem they just said warm up their car more often, I think Honda is giving people the short end of the stick in this case and Honda even recalled certain 2019 CRVs because they say there is a bad weld in the gas tank system where the fuel line enters. fuel vapor, so you will smell less fumes. you notice while driving a car when you stop and park it for me that's like oh maybe they are trying to cover up the smell of oil dilution that comes out of the exhaust pipe because who knows, but well, if a part of your engine is worn due to oil dilution, don't think the rest is not very close, it's like I tell people if you buy a car that has eight fuel injectors and it's getting old and one of them goes bad when changing that. maybe not such a good idea unless you are planning to sell the car because the rest of them are old, it is better to replace them in sets if your engine is worn inside due to oil dilution, that part is the only one that is worn out. all kinds of other parts are going to wear out inside and a lot of these parts you can't even check without destroying the whole engine because by the time they start making noise it's too late, when you rub the engine here then it's too late, everything is worn out , so unless your car is making horrible noises you won't know the bearings are warning too early, then you might ask how do you check the bearings in an engine?

Well, you need to drop the bottom of the motor. You have to remove all the piston rod caps and then you have to look at them and measure them to see if they have excessive wear. I guarantee Honda isn't going to do that now that you go back three decades. Toyota and Honda. They were competing neck and neck to make the best cars in the world, they actually came very close in the last two decades, they had a lot of AC compressor failures, they had AC compressors, they were just making a cheaper clutch on the compressor end of AC, makes it spin.

It spins the shaft and the shaft used to be very thick like your thumb, so they decided to make thinner shafts more like your little pinky and these things would break and fly off as you were going down the road. They had clients with them. I would say my air conditioning stopped working funny, a noise, they brought it to me and I looked at the whole end of the compressor, the shaft that goes in and the clutch had come loose, they were just getting a little bit too. Cheap now there is a lot of pressure on the clutch when you push it down to open it so you can change gears.

All these plastic things were breaking everywhere. I had seen the old Honda hydraulic systems that are 25 years old and still working these things are four or five years old the plastic was breaking down and what happened they had to make a metal replacement for the stupid plastic piece they put in you had to pay for it sometimes engineering goes too far to make things cheap or in the case of your oil dilution, trying to make a small engine produce a lot of horsepower and at the same time get good gas mileage and then it doesn't. test them properly in the real world to see what will happen with these systems, that was it. that honda and toyota were known for testing things before selling them to the public.

I remember a long time ago guys I knew in England were driving fuel injected Hondas in England where here in the US all Hondas had simple carburetors. What was Honda doing? They were road testing all their fuel injection systems on the English ones. 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 injection systems in the United States. Hondas in the United States were pretty bulletproof. You would never see any real problems with Honda's fuel injection system. Now I hope Honda realizes what they did wrong and improves the new one, but hey, it shouldn't have happened the first time. place and if you've been watching me you know that Scotty has been warning people for quite some time to be careful when buying a small four cylinder engine that is turbocharged direct injection gasoline, you are pushing that little engine and it has enough stress. without having to add dilution problemsoil to the mix, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring the bell.