Great road trip, 4000 miles so far since Sept 5, friends and relatives and people from back in the day! Not done yet, another 3000 miles at least. My Saturn's home in the driveway my Chrysler T&C has been exemplatory. Except had to put rear brakes on it much to my surprise, when I got it apart I found out why, when I replaced them last time I installed the inside brake pad on the disk brakes incorrect and wore it out.
moral?
Read the stupid instructions,
Carefully!
But
A number of people I visited had owned an S series Saturn and had a bunch of trouble because of Oil Consumption problems as it go older.
I still feel that problems stems from the factory insisting that a light weight multi-viscosity oil be used due to fuel mileage concerns rather than engine reliability.
It used to be a rule of thumb light oil in winter, heavy oil in summer and oil charts made recommendations based on temperature ranges and even though today the oil cap says something like 5 W 20 and people inisist upon using it as that is the way it is designed, the owners manual will still show that chart with viscosity recommendations based on Temperature and so does the oil companies, look it up.
And people here have a tanty when the subject comes up.
Right there on my new Chrysler is a 5 w 20 labled oil cap on the valve cover that I removed to fill it up with a fresh load of 15 W 50 Mobile 1 that I hve used since the first oil change.
My Saturn, it was switched from 10 W 30 to 20 W 50 shortly after it was purchase 16 years ago as a late model used car.
It does not use oil, it runs happily, and I look forward to many more years of satisfactory service and the more involved I get here, the more I believe that
when a marketing guy determined that a skosh better fuel mileage can be achieved by using light weight oil, (no argument) with out concern with engine reliability (the factory don't care once the warrenty is up) it established a new standard of not selecting oil used as a function of how and where the car was used!
Engine durability went down the toilet and stayed there.
For shame detroit, your bad! How many more dissatisfied customers do you want to influence to buy something else other than your car,
befor you go out of business too!