by Cowboy Dave on Tue Oct 21, 2014 7:21 pm
You probably got a bit lucky with your timing too mate. In the current climate of engines being replaced due to overheating it would have been pretty hard for them to be having an argument as to why yours might have done it for some unrelated issue. Not sure where you heard that they recommend AC Delco - I've only ever heard the same old mantra - use genuine parts. For the money you save (SFA compared to the cost of the car) it's just not even worth having the argument.
Just a short note on this whole 'recall' issue.
The word I am hearing is that as I have posted before this thing that is going on is officially called a service campaign. As I have said before it is not a recall. Unfortunately dealer service personnel are being a bit loose with their terminology and using the word recall when this is not in fact a recall. So these texts that people are receiving from dealers is them using the wrong wording as a kind of shorthand. If this were a recall, then as has been previously noted that would involve notifying the federal authorities, advertising the recall in national newspapers and so on. None of that has or will occur according to the current plan.
This has been separately confirmed here and on the Pajero forum linked to earlier in this thread by posters who have much better MMAL sources than I am likely to ever have.
However, because they want to cast the net pretty wide, and because some dealers have stuffed up by calling it a recall when it isn't, and because obviously rumour is rife on social media and forums like this one and the Pajero forum linked to earlier, Mitsubishi will be taking what I gather is an unprecedented step and writing to owners on their database advising of the service campaign and suggesting people take their Tritons and challengers in to be checked as part of that campaign.
Maybe precision with language and nomenclature is unimportant to most, but in cases like this the label has a pretty specific meaning so to be clumsy with applying the wrong label is a bit dangerous for the companies involved. I guess that for poor MMAL it must be a bit like herding cats trying to keep people across the whole country singing to the same hymn sheet which is why some service departments have gone a bit off message since the whole thing began.
At the end of the day for owners it probably doesn't matter much because the crux of it is that they will test things at their cost and if it has the problem they will fix it at their cost. The few examples so far have involved loan cars to affected customers so that is probably part of it too.
We still don't have all of the details, but what I have been able to glean so far is that the process involves replacing the coolant. As part of the process the mix may change from about 30% ethylene glycol to about 50% ethylene glycol. Having recently looked at a few different coolants those two concentrations were the most common mixes in aftermarket green coolants that I saw (including Nulon and Penrite for example). At the higher concentration the boiling point is increased slightly and the freezing point becomes impossible to achieve in Australia (not that we much care about freezing here...). Above 50% you start to run into other issues that aren't worth thinking about.
In addition to the coolant change they are then fitting an upgraded radiator cap. As we know from Ken's post last night the new cap can take 127kpa. The old caps took 110kpa. The change is probably pretty marginal but again as I understand it the ability to hold that extra pressure should theoretically keep the whole setup functioning for longer before the cap starts letting coolant and steam come pissing out the top. So there should be a functional improvement in the capacity there if I'm understanding the dynamics correctly.
The third layer of protection is this ECU reflash to add a new limp mode if the engine temp exceeds some sort of heat margin. I don't know what that margin is or which temperature sensor it will be reading from - there is probably more than one sensor to choose from there.
The only other step I've heard of is that after doing that stuff there are some sort of parameters around what you do if it looks like it is losing coolant. Presumably if you fill it up and next time you look it's half empty then you know there is something going pretty wrong there. Anyway they have to run the motor up to operating temperature under the new pressures. No doubt those with worn hoses and stuff may find a few of them get popped off during testing. I imagine (but don't know) that MMAL would be replacing those hoses and any other fittings that can't take the pressure under testing.
I don't know, but suspect, that under the increased pressures in the cooling system the expectation is that at running temps the problem motors will make themselves known. Those which don't will leave the dealerships with effectively an upgraded cooling system and an inbuilt safety factor with the new limp mode built into the software. If the problem later emerges then presumably you still qualify for a replacement motor.
For my part I plan to set an alarm on the ultragauge for coolant temps over say 98 degrees to remind me to check stuff out if it gets that warm. As mine seems to regularly go to the mid 90's anyway it will be difficult not to panic for a while but since I've not had a problem with it in nearly 5 years I'm not expecting to have a problem with it now.
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