I hate even labeling this 'Car Fun' but its the only way to keep it in order, especially as it's now part of the whole 'Car Shopping' thread. I should make sure to add that I haven't been privy to all of the information, but I want to keep this as up to date as possible so I don't forget what I've learned.
B and M have had worse and worse luck with the new Edge. We knew that it would need to go into a shop, preferably the local Ford Dealership. I believe B was bouncing between the local dealership and the dealership where we bought it. In the meantime, it was drivable. It would be rough upon start up but eventually smooth out. Then one day, I'm not sure which day, M said she saw 'white smoke' coming out of the tailpipe when she started it up.
Here's where the car knowledge level comes in. R, in our family, has the most knowledge. What he doesn't know, he has contacts for like our neighbor. I have a lot of theoretical knowledge without much hands on experience. B likes cars and knows that there's an engine that does stuff. M probably wouldn't be surprised to find a hamster running in a big wheel under the hood.
Naturally, she contacted B about the white smoke. B said it should be fine, believing that it might be running rich because of the cylinder misfiring. So, M continued to drive it.
White smoke is NOT from an engine running rich. White smoke coming from the exhaust system is almost always going to be coolant being pushed through the engine. That means a busted head gasket. That means the engine isn't being cooled properly. That means turn the car off and don't turn it on until it's in the hands of a mechanic. You see, the coolant is piped around the cylinders (and other parts of the engine) to keep them from overheating. It is NOT part of the combustion system and shouldn't interact with the fuel, exhaust, or oil. There's a gasket between the head of the engine and the block. This gasket, in part, keeps the coolant in its lane and out of the combustion lane. If the gasket is bad, gets deteriorated, or has a design problem that lets the coolant pass through it, coolant generally gets pumped into a cylinder. In and of itself, this isn't terrible. The coolant prevents the cylinder from firing properly, boils, and gets blown out the exhaust as white smoke (the exhaust will also tend to smell sweet). BUT, if it continues to happen, the coolant can make it past the cylinder and into the oil. Once it gets that far, the cylinder is probably not firing at all, so more coolant can now get in and less of it gets boiled off. It's a chain reaction that just starts sending more and more coolant THROUGH the cylinder and into the oil.
There's a breaking point when this happens, where the oil gets so much coolant in it that it stops being able to do its job. Lubricating the engine. That problem doesn't fix itself. The sludge that used to be the oil (it will look like frothy chocolate milk at this point) needs to be flushed, cleaned, and replaced with new oil. Often, this flushing process will need to be done multiple times, and sometimes under pressure to get all of the coolant out. But if you continue to run the engine in this state, you have multiple problems.
First problem is that you're either running low on coolant or worse, are out of coolant. Your engine is now overheating. It won't even give the tell tale sign of steam coming out from under the hood because there's no coolant under there to boil over. It's all been shot out the back. An overheating engine can go for awhile, so long as its properly lubricated. And yeah, you guessed it, once you've ruined the oil the engine is no longer getting lubricated. That will let parts rub against each other that shouldn't, metal on metal. That will cause MORE heat. Eventually you'll reach catastrophic failure. The head will warp, the block will crack, the pistons or other parts will seize.
Replacing a bad head gasket is annoying and on the moderate side of expensive. This isn't just a quick 'pull these bolts, pull this part, replace the part, replace the bolts' type of repair. It's pull off most of the top of the engine, clean the old gasket out, put a new one in, hope that whatever caused the failure doesn't happen again, and put it all together hoping that there hasn't been some minor warping that will keep the gasket from sealing. Flushing the oil isn't terrible, but it's time consuming. Cleaning out a cylinder that's been drenched in coolant isn't TOO bad, but it's a job. All of these together can easily be a couple thousand dollars in repairs. But the catastrophic failure? That's a new engine. With modern engines, that's $7,000 to $10,000 with inexpensive labor.
I really wish either M or B contacted me or R about the white smoke. But they didn't and she continued to drive it. Yesterday, it got suddenly bad enough that it wouldn't drive properly. No power, almost stalling under idle, sounding terrible, feeling worse. She was close to her mother's and dropped the Edge off there. B was at work, so she contacted my Mom and just lost it. Mom, being the generous soul she is, told her to leave it to B and to have M's mom bring her over to our place where M could again take Mom's Escape.
Again, I'm not privy to all of the conversations, but B got the dealership he bought it from to have it towed to the local dealership and have it diagnosed. They haven't guaranteed anything past that, and in all honesty I'd find it sus if they did. They can't know what's going on, so they can't commit to anything. So far as they know, it might be a few hundred dollars to fix. It might be a little over a grand. It might be several grand. It might be almost the entire value of the vehicle. So naturally they can't say "it will be fixed" at this point. Even if they're the best of people and stand behind their products, the result might be them buying it back from us or taking its value in for trade.
I'd mentioned that we bought this from a Land Rover dealership, where reputation will go a far way. The dealership is also owned by one of the largest networks of car dealerships in the state (its actually one of the largest in the country). So not only is reputation important to the entire network, they have a wide availability of other cars.
So we're now in a holding pattern. Per the local dealership, they have a week's waiting list to get the car in. It's been towed and is sitting in their lot waiting to be seen. Hopefully next week sometime we'll at least have an answer as to what's wrong.
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