my cousin's 99 GSR started knocking while I was driving. He took it into the dealership and they want to replace the short block, non warranty (only 22k miles on the car). The engine lost oil somehow, and threw some sort of bearing in the crankcase (I forget the conversation off the top of my head).
Now here's the kicker: they claim that there was no oil leak, the oil didn't burn up, but that the oil was manually removed from the engine, causing the damage. How can we prove that it was not manually removed, but due to mechanical fault? Or does anyone have any ideas as to how this could've happened? Before the knocking started, there was a brief flash of the oil lamp but it did not stay lit. Also there was no check engine light.

:flabbergasted:

 

ttt

 

Josh,

The car probably spun a rod bearing (maybe a main) which would necessitate a new bottom end (at least a crank and rods and its a good diea to do the whole thing).

As for the manually removing oil thing, that just sounds ludicrous! AFAIK, the burden of proof is on the dealer/manufacturer to prove that it isn't a defect, etc.

Get together your documentation on oil changes (hopefully they were done someplace where your cousin could get a receipt). If he did them himself, I hope he documented them in his owner's manual. If the car was still within the normal oil change interval (i.e. the regular services weren't being neglected) they're going to have to prove that someone took the oil out. AFAIK, that's pretty much impossible to prove.

The real key IMO is going to be how long it had been since the last oil change before teh engine failure. If it wsa a very short time (a few miles) then one could make case that someone forgot to put oil in. But any more thana couple hundred miles and there had to be a loss of oil somehow. OBDII data should be able to note if oil pressure ever dropped below the warning threshold. Also, how much oil was left in the engine?

UL