Quote:
Originally Posted by songsj
I've had my 2013 2LT/RS for almost 4 months now. Bought it with 4k on it. So many things I really like about the Gen 5's but I really have to weigh in on this catch can situation. I'm not here to debate the value of keeping your intake and valves as clean as is practical, however I have a few thoughts. First I find it really hard to believe if you have no catch can that all of that gunk is ending up sitting on your intake and valves. The car probably would not run if it was. I think a lot of that oil and moisture etc, is making it past the valves and being burned off in the combustion process. This is just my opinion and it still does not address the amount that does NOT make it past the intake and valves and DOES gunk things up. Again this is just my opinion but if a V6 is going to need an upper intake cleaning for 200.00 every 15k or so this is just a poorly designed engine and never should have gone to production. I'm sorry but there are a lot of other ways to make HP and torque. As far as making a catch can standard on the car, I suppose that would have been an option and I would prefer that to nothing at all but most of us agree that the average person would not pay attention to it, and your *****lube places would screw them up trying to empty them. Which brings me to another point. What is going to happen with all of these catch can modded cars that are traded in or sold to owners who won't even know they have one until it is giving them a problem? Gonna be some real happy campers there.
I don't know, to me I guess if DI is the way of the future they should be standard on the cars and over time people would become aware of them and service them regularly. Otherwise they should have gone with a different design. It's great that there are aftermarket companies that have addressed the issue but I still believe installs are on a relatively small amount of the V6's produced. Which means if this truly is a problem there is going to be an awful lot of screwed up poorly running v6"s in a few years. Possibly enough for the car to develop a bad reputation hurting resale value. I am not having any problems yet at 8k but I can honestly say as much as I like this car had I done more research and seen all of the horror pictures I have seen since my purchase I would have bought something else. I'm 58 and I don't think it's too much to ask to purchase a performance car stock that doesn't need an aftermarket modification to keep it running within specs from the time it is new. This may just be another one of GM's design flaws that never should have gone to production. Thoughts, looking for a civil discussion.
|
The first thing I would want to make sure everyone understands is that this is not a GM design flaw. It is just the nature of internal combustion engines. All modern engines, regardless of manufacturer, suffer from blow by and some amount of carbon build up and have upper induction cleanings in their recommended services. Direct injection engines are just especially vulnerable, regardless of the manufacturer, because they do not have fuel flowing over the intake valves. The European manufacturers where the first to really start seeing issues because they were right up front on adopting direct injection technology. Now just about every new engine that comes out is direct injection including the new LT based V8s from GM because the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
At 8k miles you have nothing to worry about. If you were to go completely unprotected and did not do the recommended upper induction cleanings by 80k miles you could see serious issues. I know of 2 Camaro5 members that had to have top end rebuilds around that range due to carbon build up. Both are running our catch can now.