rev up your engines, today I'm going to talk about a problem with modern cars that
have engines that burn oil, and I'm doing this because lately some of my customers
have told me that, they have a car engine and it's burning oil on a car that's new
or year old, two years old, they change the oil all the time, but they go to the
dealer and they say, why is my car burning a quart of oil every thousand
miles or less, to be told by the dealership, well that's normal for that
car, well it may be their definition of normality, but it's not right
and I'm going to show you the history of car engines to explain why it's not
right, now here's a cool model of a four-stroke engine, on the intake stroke
the piston goes down, the intake valves opens, air & fuel mixture goes inside the
cylinder, then on the compression stroke, the valve closes, the mixture is
compressed, and at the top the spark plug just fires, then it pushes down the
compression to give you a power, and then the last stroke, the exhaust stroke, it
pushes up, the exhaust valve opens and the spent fuel goes out the exhaust, it's
called the four-stroke motor, because it has four strokes
it has intake, it has compression, it has power, and it has exhaust, so every time
the engine fires, there's four parts to that firing, now two-stroke engine only
has two strokes, they pollute a lot more it's a total loss oil system, you have to
mix the oil with the gas and it just burns it out to lubricate it
they pollute so much that in most cases they're illegal, they do have some more
modern versions that work better, but for all intents and purposes, the engines
we are driving are four-stroke motors, and being for 4-stroke motors they should not
burn oil at all, if they do there's a problem and here's where the problems
are, the oil control ring on the piston keeps the oil from the crank from
getting by the piston and burning inside, if these oil control rings are bad or if
the inside of the cylinder itself is worn, it will burn oil, and a classic
example this was the old Chevy Vega, the engineers came up with this idea to have
an aluminum block engine, aluminum is a lot softer than iron but it weighs less
but they coated it with Teflon and they thought, well
that'll keep the aluminum from wearing and it won't burn oil, but that's what
that Teflon coating wore off real fast, I had a friend with a Chevy Vega back in
the 70s, he was burning a quart of oil every sixty miles in that stupid
thing, so if the oil control ring is worn or the cylinder is worn, you're going to burn
oil, here's a piston I took out of an old motorcycle engine, it didn't burn any oil
as you can see, the oil control ring, hey they're chrome-plated they're really
well built, if you build them right they won't burn oil, and the other way
they can burn oil is. the intake valves suck the fuel and air in, well they can
also suck in oil if the seals on the valves here are bad, the oil gets stuck
from the top of the engine by the seal and be sucked inside and then burned, now
my grandfather who was also a mechanic he was born in the late 1800s and the
early cars, they didn't even have valve seals in them, they just sucked oil in and
burnt like mad, it was expected that they burnt oil and every winter you'd have to
take the engine apart, you'd have to clean off all the carbon from the burn
oil and rebuild the engine, but modern cars should not be that way, here's my 25
year old Celica, it's got 240 thousand miles, it still
doesn't burn any oil, my wife 17 year old Lexus, it doesn't
burn any oil, and here's your previous car an 11 year old matrix it doesn't
burn oil either, but there are quite a few modern cars that are now burning oil
that shouldn't, as an example, the 2010 to 2017 Chevy Equinox with the 2.4 liter
four-cylinder engine, many of them burn more than a quart every thousand miles
and there's a class-action suit against that one, again the dealership might tell
you, oh that's normal for those cars and maybe normal for that car, but it's wrong
you don't want to buy a car like that, because if you change your oil and filter
regularly like your suppose to and use the oil they ask, in this case it's a
5w30 oil, your engine should not burn oil, as the engine fires, the oil should
remain in the crankcase, it shouldn't get inside the cylinder and burn, that's just
bad engineering or bad manufacturing processes, and with many cars these days
going to GDI gasoline direct injection and turbo
charging, there's higher and higher pressures inside the engine, higher
pressures inside the fuel injection systems, so quality control and
engineering has to be top-notch, or you'll end up with an engine that
burns oil, and let's face it, nobody wants to buy a car and then get in a
class-action suit, what a hassle, so we still live in a free society, you can
vote with your money, nobody's holding a gun to your head and says you got to buy
this particular car, do a little research online, you find out one manufacturer has
problems with engines burning oil, don't buy that manufacturers car, it's that
simple, don't listen to any nonsense that they
might tell you that, oh it's normal for these engines to burn oil, because as
the old joke goes, what's the difference between a lawyer and a liar, just a
couple of letters, and what's the difference between a salesman and a liar
nothing they're exactly the same, and for you, there's nothing worse than putting
out your hard-earned money to buy an expensive new car, only to find that in a
short period of time, the things burning oil and from this perspective, do what I
always do, never ever buy a brand-new engine design that just came out, no one
knows what the history is, like with that old Vega people thought, oh great an
aluminum block will put Teflon in it, only to find that a few thousand miles later
the engines are burning oil like mad because the Teflon all came off, so before
you buy another car, do some serious research and you can always ask me
online, I'll tell you which ones burn oil which ones don't, because we may live in
a complex society, but when it comes to four-stroke gasoline engines, one thing is
simple, they should not burn engine oil, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos remember to ring that Bell!