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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of bigger engines are running right on the edge of oiling problems these days. With fuel economy rules being what they are it's just how it is. GM isn't special in this regard. Ford is killing a lot of cams and lifters (a problem GM fought through some years ago).

Meanwhile Toyota[1] is recalling blown up turbo v6s left and right (for problems that you can't just dump different oil in to solve) because they didn't invest in keeping a big v8 on the cutting like GM did and they didn't invest in making small turbo stuff last long like Ford did.

[1]Mentioned not because they have unique problems but because who if not a Toyota fanboy makes a comment like yours

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To be fair Ford's small turbos are also notorious for shitting the bed, but mostly due to cooling system failures or the terrible choice of still running a timing belt. (1.0L Ecoboost engines)

>terrible choice of still running a timing belt. (1.0L Ecoboost engines)

3.0 Duramax says hold my beer (for the readers not familiar, it has a wet belt driving the oil pump and it's mounted in the back making proactive replacement prohibitively expensive).

My jaded take is that they're sticking with the wet belt on what's generally a europoor economy car engine in order to force planned obsolecense.

Ford's big mistake with the 1.0L Ecoboost wasn't exclusively using a timing belt, it was using a timing belt submerged in oil. They did state that they engineered the rubber to withstand being submerged in oil, but ultimately it didn't really work out like they had hoped.

Lol. The most insane thing about the 1.0 is that they switched back to a timing chain due to the belt issues. But guess what? The fuxking oil pump is still driven by a rubber belt submerged in oil... And guess what happens to the oil pump belt? Just mind blowing that they would half ass this fix so badly.

I’d love to read about how emissions / fuel economy is causing the oiling problems. Any articles?

Would putting an aftermarket oil pump in these modern engines protect them or is it a deeper design issue?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbEdr6Q6cKw

They spec the thinnest stuff they can get away with to add .0001mpg. Multiply that by all the Chevy 1500s GM makes or F150s Ford makes and you see the draw.

Sometimes it turns out that the thinnest stuff they can get away with just not quite thick enough at the margins or in transient conditions. And of course they stretch out the oil change interval to reduce on-paper TCO as well which doesn't help.

You can mitigate this with thicker oil (what GM did for the recall) by can go too far and create other oiling issues because thick oil drains back slower and going to some super high spec 0-W-<whatever> Euro oil may cause other problems related to soot and sludge so there's no silver bullet.

The "safe" advice most people give out is to use whatever the <nation with no emissions or fuel economy rules> version of your owners manual says to use for oil.

And if you have a high strung turbo engine you ought to take your oil change intervals seriously.

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