Dead Pentastar

SC Maintenance said:
Front wheel drive is by the most efficient choice for the majority of drivers that know nothing about cars, or driving for that matter. Wet, icy, whatever - Front wheel drive is better for the masses.

There also much cheaper to assemble.

I prefer real 4wd also, but were special use cases. The fact that other OEM's can make transverse mounted engines without issue is a blight on the 3.6, not the overall tech.

I will admit I would hate to work on them. I had a 3.1 on a Cutlass supreme and you could remove an upper motor mount with 1 bolt and rotate the entire engine ahead a few inches - by design, so it wasn't bad at all. Back when cars were designed to be serviced.
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I get all that - but a poor choice in the south - and I’m not sure where the factory passed on their savings …
Even our small sedan is 4WIS - rear drive …
 
4WD said:
Well, many would rather leave that plastic leaker housing/cooler alone - I run 2X 5K on a filter rated for 20K - and no torque wrench getting near my housing …
Snug with T handle only …
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Yeah, I thought about that, makes me nervous ☹️ If I keep it there for two oil changes, will things be fine? I drain my oil when it is very clean.
 
4WD said:
I get all that - but a poor choice in the south - and I’m not sure where the factory passed on their savings …
Even our small sedan is 4WIS - rear drive …
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I live in the South. It rains 3X more than national average here, and is also a good choice for utilitarian daily driver, IMHO. I wouldn't even want to know how many more cars would end up in the ditch with RWD. I don't know how they manage to get there now.

As for savings, find a RWD car that is cheaper than a comparable FWD car? But for sure nothing is cheap.
 
SC Maintenance said:
I live in the South. It rains 3X more than national average here, and is also a good choice for utilitarian daily driver, IMHO. I wouldn't even want to know how many more cars would end up in the ditch with RWD. I don't know how they manage to get there now.

As for savings, find a RWD car that is cheaper than a comparable FWD car? But for sure nothing is cheap.
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Ditch ? Are you talking about rain or snow ?
 
TomYoung said:
This is fantastic, and I’m tempted to do this, maybe with a label maker. You have me thinking about the organization. I would probably go oil, drain plug, size, torque, filter, type, size, torque.
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I put that there so that if Jeep ever goes for warranty the Stealership sees that I know what the hell I have been doing. But I use AFE 0W-30 and PUP 5w30 😃
I also have this little book

Screenshot_20250825_085958_Gallery.webp

20250716_203512(1)(1).webp
 
OVERKILL said:
I don't think it matters. When I spent time in Dallas, when it rained, all manner of vehicles were wiping out and going in the ditch because they are all driving on bald tires. It was even worse when they got a dusting of snow.
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Yeah - drove that Lexus 3-1/2 hours in significant rain leaving Lafayette La.
Tires certainly make or break that vehicle in the rain …
I chase rain in my Jeep to clean the underside …
Which tire is best? A new tire!
 
OVERKILL said:
I don't think it matters. When I spent time in Dallas, when it rained, all manner of vehicles were wiping out and going in the ditch because they are all driving on bald tires. It was even worse when they got a dusting of snow.
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Snow is 100% shut down.

I would still rather have my wife and kids in a FWD in the rain. Maybe they can avoid the other idiots. I always buy the best rain tires I can get. The current Firestone LE3's seem to be the best I could find last time. The conti cross contact also but I avoid conti - bad experience.
 
My Mickey Thompson MT's are not great in rain, but the fix is very easy, I drive like a trucker, create tons of space infront of me.
 
PNW Jeeper said:
I put that there so that if Jeep ever goes for warranty the Stealership sees that I know what the hell I have been doing. But I use AFE 0W-30 and PUP 5w30 😃
I also have this little book

View attachment 297144
View attachment 297145
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I actually was keeping my notes on 6x8 , lined post-its, handwritten. Pretty sure my wife tossed them without any understanding of what they were. On the other hand, I did not have to explain why I did this. More recently, I have taken an iPhone pic of my odometer reading, and added notes on my iPhone. It does the job. I totally respect writing this stuff down and being meticulous. There is an art, and a payoff, to really persnickety maintenance.... Took many years to understand that. Many BITOGERS will understand, most civilians don't have a clue. My hat is off to you.
 
IndyFan said:
I don't know. But if even only a very small percentage of them had the rocker arm failure, every shop in the country will have seen it multiple times. And it would be the talk of the town among mechanics.

I have two of them. I'm not on a death watch over them. In fact, I have high confidence in them. The two combined have 165,000 trouble free miles.

By the way, 15 million is conservative. They had the 10 million milestone in 2019. They've averaged putting over a million of these a year into their product line up to that point. So 6 years after that celebration, I think 15 million sounds like a good educated guess, don't you?

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I gotta agree with this. The idea that we are chasing down an engine with widespread problems is just not the case. There was a report somewhere of a work truck teardown at 600,000 miles showing essentially no wear. Any engine, any mechanical thing, might break. And there might be a production error on a small fraction of these engines, but the fact is that these Pentastars, in any application, respond to proper maintenance, normal driving, with many, many miles of reliable service.
 
The KL Cherokees are also essentially a transverse 3.6, just slightly smaller as a 3.2. Seems to me most everything is identical; the oil cooler job is definitely identical and the oil coolers are the exact same part.

I think KLs are killing their PTUs before toasting the engine in most cases. No idea if there's a trend of 3.2 failures in a specific manner.
 
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