Equinox Excessive Oil Consumption

So my coworker's wife has a '13 Equinox with the 4 banger and something like 60k miles. On their way to a wedding last weekend, in the Equinox, his wife happens to mention "Oh yea, its been making a noise recently." No kidding, coworker described it as "knocking so bad it sounded like a diesel." A few miles into their trip, CEL comes on and coworker wisely decides to ditch the Equinox at his parents' house and take their car to the wedding instead.

Meanwhile, his father checks the oil in the Chevy and ends up adding 3 quarts before it even registers on the dipstick . No visible leakage anywhere and they always get the oil changed at the dealer, so unlikely it was underfilled.

Either Monday or yesterday they end up taking it into the dealer and (eventually) find out it falls under a TSB for excessive oil consumption due to premature wear of the rings. They got the word today that the dealer will be doing a piston and ring job under warranty.

So i guess the question, as he and I were discussing this afternoon, is would you trust it after the fix has been implemented? He seems to have soured on the vehicle completely (which is entirely understandable) and is wary of both the issue returning, as well as any other issues related to the repair work. I kind of tend to agree and would be looking at trading it in as soon as they get it back (assuming they're not upside down on the loan at this point.) That's a pretty inexcusable design flaw, IMHO, in this day and age.

I know there's a GM tech or two on here and I'd be curious to hear the inside scoop as well. Will he be getting the same flawed pistons and rings put back in, or has there been a design update to the components? Google seems to indicate this was a pretty common issue on the '10-'11 model year cars, but doesn't seem as common on the '12+ models like his.

Honda had the same problem with the 2.4's in the 12-14 range. Initial re-ring jobs were a 50/50 shot of fixing it. Byt around '13 they were up to about 75% shot of fixing the problem. Put a lot of short blocks in. The nice thing, if the fix fails, they'll know fast.

I work for GM as a service tech, and here's the deal. Originally it was that we were putting whole engines in these piles. Then GM found out how much that was costing and decided to instead just slap pistons and rings in them instead (no honing or boring eve, because the bores are non-serviceable). The very same pistons and rings that fail in the first place. Can't really change them because of emissions reasons.

Now, before they can order parts, they first have to document it burning more than a quart in 2000 miles (easy) and then it has to get torn down. If there is ANY damage to the bore, you get a new engine because, remember, the bores are nonserviceable. Also, it will likely get timing chains at this point because they use oil pressurized tensioners and then the chains get sloppy and saw through the guides. If the chain has sawed into the chaincase structure in the block it gets a new engine, if it saws into the bolt bosses in the head it gets a new cylinder head (with the same old valves and cams).

The usual order of failure on these engines is timing chains at 50k, pistons and rings at 75k and then timing chains again at 100K, with the transfer case blowing up without warning somewhere in between. And yes, we do have vehicles coming back in for their second round of oil consumption testing to get a new set of pistons. Make no mistake, the Equinox/Terrain is a vile piece of equipment. Yes, the pistons/rings/timing chains are special coveraged until doomsday but there is the fact that you really can't trust them not to have a catastrophic engine failure when they get older (read over 50,000 miles) and the inconvenience of your vehicle being torn down for a few days at the dealership. And it is a very common issue. WE are a smaller dealership (10 techs) and there is at least one getting engine work in every week and sometimes as many as three or 40 (That's 30%-40% of our workforce). One tech once went 7 weeks in a row doing Equinox pistons/rings/timing chains at a rate of a one a week.

My suggestion, get the pistons and rings put in under warranty and then offload that sucker ASAP and don't buy another GM CUV. The bigger Acadia/Traverse is even nastier.

Run low enough on oil to knock usually means new engine time.

I am curious what is meant by 'the bores are non-servicable'. Not enough cast iron in them for even a small overbore, or something else? I believe I have seen these LAF/LEA blocks in its as cast and cubing machined state and they looked like they have pretty thick iron cylinder liners cast into the aluminum block. Crappy cast datum scheme though, but that is a whole different discussion.

In reply to einy:

Don't know. GM just says they cannot be bored or honed due to a special surface treatment. Some sort of plasma spray like what Ford was using perhaps?

Funny my RAV4 had the same issue. 2007 RAV4 4 cylinder. Maybe same ring supplier. Haha

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine:

The problem is being largely attributed to the direct injection. The higher combustion chamber temps are causing greater carbon buildup and sticking the rings in the ring lands. Another reason that GDI may not be all it's cracked up to be.

After you get it back, give it an Italian tune up.

New a guy years ago that was PO'd at the run around with oil consumption and decided to try and blow up the engine. It didn't blow but it stopped using oil.

NickD wrote: In reply to Fueled by Caffeine: The problem is being largely attributed to the direct injection. The higher combustion chamber temps are causing greater carbon buildup and sticking the rings in the ring lands. Another reason that GDI may not be all it's cracked up to be.

No, it just means customers needto actually service these. The Koreans are doing seafoam-like treatments at 30 and 60k intervals to help with the carbon build up. Honda as well now. Toyota is using a combo port/DI that helps and may be the best answer to date.

Bobzilla wrote:

NickD wrote: In reply to Fueled by Caffeine: The problem is being largely attributed to the direct injection. The higher combustion chamber temps are causing greater carbon buildup and sticking the rings in the ring lands. Another reason that GDI may not be all it's cracked up to be.

No, it just means customers needto actually service these. The Koreans are doing seafoam-like treatments at 30 and 60k intervals to help with the carbon build up. Honda as well now. Toyota is using a combo port/DI that helps and may be the best answer to date.

We try selling induction services but GM sits there and hypes it's 100K maintenance free policy, and so customers think the dealers are trying to rob them. Not like we know what goes wrong with the vehicles or anything.

In reply to NickD:

I agree. A lot of GM's quality problems can be directly attributed to this idiotic idea.

In reply to Bobzilla:

And even the ones we service still seem to develop the problem eventually. Its interesting to note that the same basic engine is used in a number of other platforms and none of them have even remotely the same amount of problems. But they are all in lighter vehicles. I wonder if it's because the engine is worked so much harder in the Equinox. If you've ever drive a 4-cylinder Equinox, you know that the engine feels strained at all times.

In reply to NickD:

So it sounds like this thing is a steaming pile, as we suspected. Thanks for all the info, that's just what I was looking for and I'll be sure to show this to him tomorrow.

Interesting you mentioned them having to document the usage over 2000 miles. The dealer had initially told my coworker they would have to change the oil, then bring it back in 2000 miles, which his wife had told them was unacceptable. So they relented and agreed to do the repairs (if you wanna call it that, I guess) right away. They won't be missing out on some sort of warranty coverage because of this, will they?

In reply to NickD:

Are you guys seeing a lot of 1.4T piston failures too? You must be getting good at popping motors out of things by now.

never had a DI engine, but my go to strategy for high oil consumption on a motor that has been lazily driven, is to change the pcv, dog the hell out of it, and do an seafoam style treatment, hasnt completely fixed all of them but has always made a big improvement.

I'll second NickD (I work in GM parts). Lots of timing chains, pistons, rings, and engines go out the door...

However, it's interesting to note that a couple of our techs own these, but only use Mobil 1 oil, not Dexos (which oddly just switched to a full synthetic oil about a month ago) All of these serviced this why have made it over 150k without issue.

1.4t just leak all the coolant out, overheat, and warp the head. Which is also non-serviceable. They go through turbos like candy as well. Changing your oil "helps" with that though...

In reply to Furious_E:

Our oil consumption testing procedure is that we change the oil on start and then make the customer come back every ~1000 miles and document oil usage and top off the engine and then submit a sheet to GM after the repairs (Funny story there, we had a guy who was convinced his truck was using oil and that burning a quart in 7000 miles was excessive. Kept bringing it in and we couldn't find any usage so the guy finally brings it in and goes "I'm sure it burned oil this time"> He'd pulled the drain plug, drained three quarts out of the pan and drove it in with only half the oil in it). So, if the dealership wants to play that way, I'm thinking that they'll likely just fudge the paperwork. It's on them though, so if they don't do it, they'll end up paying for it when GM kicks back the warranty claim.

In reply to ssswitch:

The 1.4T does not seem to have the issues of the 2.4L or 3.6L. The big one is the water pumps that are prone to leakage but GM has put a special coverage on those to put them under warranty until 10 years/150K miles. They also have valve cover breathers that get leaking and throws about 10 CEL codes, but those are also Special Coveraged. Turbochargers do wipe out the bearings but that's because people run them 10K on oil changes and then coke up the oil feed line and starve the bearings. And I have seen some of the coolant fittings that bolt to the back of the turbo recently, but I'm not sure if it's going to be a major issue or just a bad batch.

We did put pistons in a singular 1.4T but it was when the Sonic first came out and the guy put like 50K miles on the car in 3 months, so I'm not sure if that was some sort of early run issue, because we ended up swapping the transmission out in another 5K miles.

NickD, do you know anything about the Suzuki XL-7 version made here in Ontario? A friend was asking and I thought it might be good for her needs but that was before I saw this. They run the 3.6 on a stretched chassis. There is some debate on whether the motors are slightly different or not.

Thanks

Semi related:

NickD - Does the equinox or any of the other platform variants suffer from the same BCM issues the VUE is prone to? If so, is there a perma-fix? My wife has a VUE, and while I want to replace it with a Mazda 5, she kinda likes it. Its a terrible vehicle to drive but keeping it around would be a lot cheaper than going the Mazda route.

Re: DI. Had this discussion about my '09 E92 N54 (known problem) w/ my indie mechanic, best around. Most manufacturers are gonna develop carbon build-up in the intake/ valves from the PCV and hot intake tract surface because no injector upstream to wash the intake/ valve area down, some as soon as 30-40K miles that they'll start throwing codes.

Consensus: Mfgrs/ dealers aren't prepared to deal w/ this DI carbon issue. Seafoam in the inlet would be a reasonable prevention as mentioned. My N54 isn't that much of a chore walnut shell blasting the intake/ valves being inline six, have all the stuff to DIY it, maybe spring. Let it go too long on a V-6 or V-8 and cost multiplies, they ain't gonna wanna do that.

Probably the best prevention to DI intake carbon buildup is a separator/ OCC in the PCV line, mfgrs may think they got the PCV system right... but they don't.

Any DI keeper of mine is gonna get the separator/ OCC and Seafoam treatment periodically.

In reply to Jeff:

My dealership never sold or service Suzukis and I never really paid any attention to them. It looks like they used the older version of the 3.6L, like in the 1st-gen CTS, but from a bit of quick Googleage, I'm seeing complaints of timing chain issues.

In reply to ProDarwin:

What generation of Vue are we talking about?

NickD wrote: In reply to Jeff: My dealership never sold or service Suzukis and I never really paid any attention to them. It looks like they used the older version of the 3.6L, like in the 1st-gen CTS, but from a bit of quick Googleage, I'm seeing complaints of timing chain issues. In reply to ProDarwin: What generation of Vue are we talking about?

up to '07

This thread just undid about 10 years worth of perceived GM quality improvement in my mind.