Cars requiring oil between oil changes- Consumer Reports

Maintenance/Repairs
121

Honestly, I thought that you lived in SoCal to not use the washers. I mean, Seattle proper is coastal, and has milder weather as a result…but (given the latitude) wouldn’t you get a fair amount of snow on your inland forays across the state?

And, as for not needing it for snow–I get it–but:
“What about BUGS?/Don’t you want to get rid of 'em/What about BUGS?/Just squirt and wash away!/What about BUGS?/You only need to wash off the goo…”
(Apologies to the Wilson sisters…)

And, you can have OUR rain, here in SW PA. The local hardware store is now stocking wood by the “cubit.”

122

I live in southern california, and I use the washers a lot

Windshields also get dirty from regular driving

At work, there is only outside parking, and a lot of dust and dirt gets blown around

123

Dust and dirt? I don’t think I ever remember using the washers back when I lived in SoCal. For dust? Seriously? I mean in dust storm conditions maybe but just for everyday driving? In fact I would think that washer fluid plus dust would just make a mess of things and leave the whole car streaky with the run-off.

And for bugs, I usually just clean the windshield next time I stop for gas.

124

@asemaster

Where I work, ALL the cars get extremely dirty. It can’t be helped

125

Average precipitation for Buffalo NY, rain 40 inches, snow 94 inches. Last year we doubled that. Ous Eastern and Southern suburbs also double that on the average. We had one storm last lear that dumped 7 FEET of snow in several suburbs. The real figure for the city itself should be higher but our official figures are taken at a suburban airport that lies just North of the snow belt.

To add to that we have a bare roads where our roads are plowed and salted until the snow and ice is completely gone from the pavement. For weeks and sometimes months at a time our roads and cars are a dirty gray/tan and even when the weather is clear you are driving through salt puddles or salt dust from the roads.

I buy washer fluid 6 jugs at a time.

126

Meanjoe, salt spray is one thing but the bugs in Minnesota are pretty hardy. Running the washer to clear bugs off your windshield will just result in a smeared windshield that you can’t see out of at all. So you stop for gas and clear those suckers off or I try to keep paper towels and Windex in the trunk for bugs on the windshield. IMHO anyway.

127

Read this sheet and go down to the line about Northstar Oil Consumption. It may not be such a bad thing, especially in higher performance engines. Notice that the CR list includes quite a few of those.

http://www.cadillacforums.com/cadillac-tech.html

128

Well that’s interesting. I’ve been over-filling my Northstar for at least ten years. The book said 7.5 quarts but it takes 8.5 to show full on the dip stick. I asked the dealer years ago and they said to go with the dip stick. Looks like when warm, 7.5 is correct but shows low when cold? I dunno.

129

Interesting about the comment on always raining but not much rain in Seattle. I was at Ft. Lewis in the mid-60’s, mostly at Crash Rescue at Gray Airport . Most of the year for civvies I wore a wool sweater and wool dress trousers. And, though I never thought of it at the time, I never needed a rain coat The rain sort of dripped off that wool.

Our Crash Rescue barracks, still the old WWII style, were at the east end of Pendleton, just before the main street coming in from the Interstate. We planted corn in our flower bed, and due to low sun, the plants grew about a foot tall, and the tassle about 2 feet tall. I think we got like 10 kernels of corn total.

That year, there was a major ice storm, and the whole area was crippled. My '53 Chevrolet had a stuck automatic choke, so I simply blocked it open and for those few days I started the car below freezing without the choke. The California guys could barely get their cars to run at all at those temperatures. Heck, I installed the rebuilt motor and transmission down around zero degrees, outside, then drove it 2050 miles to Ft. Lewis in 50 hours.

So many cars froze up that the Interstate into Tacoma looked like a parking lot. Hee, hee.

It was pay day during the iced up period. I was volunteered to drive the Lieutenant to get the pay roll because the other guys were scared of the ice. The funny part of that was I had not been trained on the …45 they gave me. They just showed me how to insert the magazine and charge the chamber.

My brother a year or so later was at Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. He and a buddy allegedly went down to Purdue with Brasso and polished up the ample and lovely chest of the bronze statue of the Goddess of Love. The local folks wanted their heads on a platter if they could have identified the culprits. They went back in the daylight to get the obvious photo. She did look kind of cute that way. I wondered what they did, just let her corrode back or what?

He almost always drove the hearse to the airport for bodies coming back from VN, for the region because the other fellows mostly had no experience on ice and snow.

130

I went and read the CR article about the oil burners. Looked like a great article to me.

There are several main reasons I don’t agree with those who dismiss those bringing suit as whiners

One is not all the cars in a model year group do it. If all BMW’s of a model did it then one could say it’s normal. They do not all do it, so they can indeed build cars which are not massive burners. They are shipping junk for good money.

I worked in corporate America for over 30 years, and am extremely confident there were peons who complained they were selling junk, sort of like the men who told NASA not to fire that rocket below freezing and were told to shut their stupid mouths.

I am also confident it was management who made the decision to ship junk, not the engineers. I have been wrong before and expect to be wrong again, but that is how corporate systems work.

Next, I am also confident that a specific decision was made which caused that oil burning. It could have been sloppy quality control, but I doubt it. I could write many stories just from my company very similar to this.

Just one quick one, on one minor project every time they retested one of the boxes, there was a 40% chance it would destroy itself. For 18 years, rush-rush management refused to let the techs investigate why a standard test would blow the things up. when I came on the project, I complained and was called a smart aleck for questioning something that had been that way for 18 years. A young idealistic engineer agreed that made no sense, so we sneaked into the test set and discovered that 18 years earlier someone had run a wire to the wrong end of the 100 ohm resistor that was supposed to supply a 100 ohm short test. So, for 18 years, they short tested it at 0 ohms. Not one more ever failed after we re-wired the test set per drawings.

Lastly, I suspect soon enough they will fix it once they realize that the customers aren’t buying the They All Do It routine. And, it won’t be hard to fix since the peons already know why it happens.

Everybody else makes cars that aren’t massive burners, and there are some excellent cars out there. Some of you would have us believing they make some sort of special and different type of car that is to other cars as Jonathon Livingston Seagull was to other gulls. They are not. They would be great cars, although very expensive, if they fix the oil burning problem Until they do, they are selling junk for good money.

131

Some people really like the patina on brass. Myself, I like brass highly polished-no matter how old it is. Now I don’t know about only polishing portions of a statue, I probably would have been tempted to do the whole thing and ruined the whole effect.