The car over the weekend right at 66001 miles asked for another quart of oil. Right at 785 miles since the last quart of Castrol Edge I added. This problem since the replacement of the oil trap(PCV) seems to be getting exponentially worse.
I agree with many of the posts that this would not have shown up in a pre-purchase inspection. It seems and Volvo seems to agree, that the only way to detect this problem is with time and an oil consumption test. I probably should have still gotten an inspection, but instead I put too much faith in the 2yr/24k service agreement/extended service warranty that the Cadillac/GMC dealer sold me. It hid a clause about excessive oil consumption at the very end of the contract just behind a clause about “shop towel disposal costs” and right before, not covering “rental car costs” outside of the service agreement dates. Not kidding, make sure that you fully read, these contracts. The true contract hides in the fine details of the exclusions; and when you read the words “ALL internal lubricated parts…”, in the body of the contract it truly means “SOME internal lubricated parts under VERY limited circumstances…”
I did open my own request for Goodwill through the VCUSA website last week and that resulted in my getting a phone call back from my local service advisor, saying I need to agree to the tear down for $869 and VCUSA will see what they can do at that time. I pointed out that at that point I would feel kind of cornered with a torn-down engine at their mercy.
The dealership seems very “flow-charted” in terms of how they are dealing with the symptoms of this, but they do not want to even loosely pre-explain the possible scenarios based on what they might find after a full tear down. Given 24 hours gestation time, they seemed very unwilling to even stick with the pistion/ring diagnosis of $4900.
It looks like there are at least three possible reasons why these engines are doing this:
The piston rings are not seating correctly.
The original spark plugs were falling apart.
The positive crankcase ventilation provided by the oil trap was not working correctly (the first scenario that the dealership seemed to take on according to the flow-charts).
For those of you with a mechanical bent, I wonder why a system is not in place that would be easily readable by an OBD code if you truly had a positive crankcase ventilation problem. This seems like to my very limited abilities, an easy thing to measure with a pressure sensor in the crankcase and with a little calculation, could easily set off a general check-engine light (something which I have still yet to see on my dashboard, I only get the add a quart message).
The other thing about positive crankcase ventilation is that you do not have to do a lot of reading on Volvo forums to realize that failures in positive crankcase ventilation lead to many premature deaths of Volvo engines. Why does Volvo not set a regular maintenance schedule for this item and does not even mention it in my Service and Maintenance Schedule booklet?
The other questionable thing about crankcase ventilation with this cars engine is that, with the tried and true “Dipstick method” for checking your oil, if the pressure was high and the PCV had failed, often times it would push the dipstick and the friction provided by the o-ring up out of the tube and to any shade tree mechanic this would be a sign that the PCV system had failed and needed to be replaced.
The lack of a dipstick on this car is truly annoying under these circumstances with the only indicators being either FULL or ADD A QUART. My understanding is that the dealer’s computers can read the oil level to a MM. Does anyone know of an inexpensive OBD reader that would let me see the exact level of the oil?
As a little more background info, my car did have the spark plug recall done at just past 40k according to my service advisor.
Thanks for the input everyone. I truly may have made a mistake with this car, but I am willing to share my journey in the transparent hope that it might help others. It might truly be the case with these recent Volvo’s that unless you buy a CPO that they should be avoided. But my hope would be that a car company, who wants to sell cars in the 40-80k dollar range, would realize that there is great value to those of us willing to assume the residual values on these vehicles after 2-3 years, so that they can upgrade/update the original customer to another new car.