I was told that I need a new head gasket for $1500 due to a little oil on the bottom of the car, not on the ground or anything, could this be accuarate? I was told all subarus of this year have this problem by the mechanic.
About all I can suggest is to have a second set if eyes look at it.
How often do you check the oil level ? Yea, that’s what I thought. You need to check the oil at every fill up, if there is no indication of a problem.
Since you now have an indication of a problem, you should be checking the oil level at least every week (maybe daily for now) to verify how much is leaking.
A little more info would also help:
How told you that you need a new head gasket? fast oil change joint, dealer, friend, independent mechanic? Also what year Impreza and how many miles on it?
I would get a 2nd opinion.
If you have the 2.5L impreza engine (2002-2005) and 1999,2000 some Impreza there is a higher than normal failure rate of head gaskets.
If this is the 2.2L engine I would be very suspect on this. Very few head gaskets fail on those motors.
You didn’t include the year of your Impreza, so it’s hard to say whether or not the information you received is correct.
Oil on the bottom of the engine or the car is not usually an indication of head gasket problems, however.
Who is the mechanic? Is he or she a Subaru specialist?
By the way, there is no such thing as a problem ALL Subarus have, regardless of the year.
Have the cyinder head bolts retorqued and see if this stops the problem. This simple, potential fix is seldom thought of, much less done.
WELL MAYBE. Subarus are well known for head gasket failures. Subaru knows of the issue and have re-issued an updated Head Gasket to repair the issue. They SHOULD RECALL THEM!!! If the oil leak is bad then you may want to do it just for that purpose. If you do not have the gaskets done you will eventully get intermittent overheating issues. These overheating probs will absolutely CONFOUND lesser mechanics that are not familiar with this Subaru specific issue. Mechanics will chase the overheat problem to the ends of the earth with no fix…it will be extremely expensive to follow that path. Either live with a minor oil leak…if it is minor, or wait until it begins to overheat strangely out of nowhere, which is dangerous because you can cause further damage…but 9 out of 10 times it will be head gasket damage you cause…so it will be fixed by the head gasket job. This one is definitely up to you…That oil leak is the precursor to the headgasket failure. Might happen soon might not, theres no way to tell unfortunately. When you do get it done you will do BOTH sides…do NOT allow anyone to tell you otherwise.
There’s no maybe about it. I’ve done it countless times and way back several decades ago Subaru even came out with either a TSB or an “unwritten TSB” stating this. It’s been long enough I don’t remember.
The reason why was because at the time Subaru had discontinued the policy of retorquing head bolts on automatic transmission equipped cars but NOT the manual transmission models.
So what happened? The auto transmission models weeped oil and the manual transmission ones did not.