True, but I think it’s very unfortunate that new cars aren’t coming with waterless coolant, and I really wish it was at least an extra cost option when buying a new car if the automakers don’t want to increase their cost.
The main reason I would like to see it, and the reason I am switching my modern cars to waterless, is because plastic piping and hotter running engines don’t mix.
The E-Type has what, a 4psi cap rating? Modern cars have a 20psi rated cap. The rating is higher because instead of having thermostats in the 160-180 range like the old days, the engines are built to run around 200 degf. Why? Because of what Paul said: They make more power, use less fuel, and produce less emission at a higher temp.
The pressure in the cooling system has to be higher to maintain higher boiling points. 20psi is a lot of pressure! A football is rock hard at 13psi. Why is pressure a problem?
Because to save cost and weight, manufacturers are putting all sorts of complex shaped plastic pipes in the cooling system. There’s no way to replace them with metal because some of these plastic parts are doing things like holding the thermostat outside the block, which is like removing organs from the human body and plumbing them to work outside the body. Jaguar has this in all their engine designs over the past 10 years.
So now you have complex plastic parts being exposed to higher pressures and temperatures, and the plastic is failing in 5-7 years and blowing engines left and right. These new all-aluminum engines that are running at higher temps warp heads and drop valve seats almost immediately after one of these plastic cooling pipes splits open and dumps the coolant. Without the pressure, the coolant at the heads flashes to steam and it’s all over before you can pull to the side of the road to shut the engine down.
I have 2 Jaguar XF’s and the forum is riddled with people selling their cars for scrap because the cost of the engine repair/replacement is more than the value of their cars.
I just swapped Evans into our Range Rover Sport. It was a royal pain to flush out enough of the water base coolant to meet the specs of Evans (3-5% water content). It would have been so much better if it was a factory fill. The end result is that the car’s engine temp is still spot on, but after the Rover has been driving in the Houston heat, I can immediately pop the hood and remove the coolant reservoir cap and there’s zero pressure. Do that normally, and I’d have a face full of hot coolant.
The side benefits of no corrosion and never having to replace the coolant are nice, but I am after the zero pressure to save my engines from plastic failure. If I do develop a leak, without the pressure, it won’t be a catastrophic loss of coolant, and I will have time to pull over and shut down when I get a low coolant light.
Plus life will be much easier on the water pump seals. A lot of modern cars are having water pump leakage within the first 50K miles – Jag included.
On my XF’s, I proactively changed all the plastic and water pumps a couple of years ago, and that was 2 grueling days of wrenching about $1000 in plastic parts and another $350/each for new water pumps, times 2 for 2 XF’s, but I still plan to change those cars over to Evans as well now that I see it working well on the Rover.
If this is such a problem, and waterless can solve the problem, then why aren’t manufacturers jumping to solve the issue? Well, these plastic pipes are easily lasting the length of the warranty, and their failures outside of warranty are generating some darn good revenue. Many of the extended warranties are wising up and excluding the repair of these parts and the resulting engine damage.
