Guys,
Since Ward's has a list of the top engines of the various years, what about the worst engines of all time? I only thought of this after driving my aunt's 2005 Ford Taurus SE with the boat anchor 3.0 Vulcan V6 yesterday. 153hp, pushrods, sub-22 mpg on avg. Known everywhere as having "the power of a small 4 and the economy of a big six". Most of the 4 cyls in base cars have more power than this sorry engine. What are your suggestions for crappiest engine of all time?

 

The carburetor-fied 4-cylinder on the 1983 Dodge Aries
The 2.3L Quad4 in the 1989 Buick Skylark
Any Yugo motor
Early Hyundai 4-cylinders

A whole series of Soviet-Bloc engines but for simplicity I'm sticking with crap from the U.S.

 

I hated the engine in my 1999 Eclipse GS spyder. It revved sky high but didn't provide any kind of power/pull. It was almost like a s2000 wannabe....

141 hp (105 kW) 2.4L 16-valve SOHC Mitsubishi 4G64 engine

 

1981 Cadillac 6.0 8-6-4. A motor produced, thankfully, for only one year. A six liter V-8 better suited to lawn ornamentation and bridge foundation shoring. I believe it made a whopping 140 horsepower. It had a wonderful deactivation cylinder process where it could run on four or six cylinders if you felt that the 140 horse, eight cylinder program was entirely unnecessary in a 5000 pound Caddy. What a piece of shit. In my last year of high school a friend's father gave me his to get it working right. I remember setting it up to run on eight cylinders and finally giving up.


Terry

 

Charliemike jiggled my memory...only engine worse than the Vulcan was the Iron Duke / Tech 4 in my ex-wife's Pontiac Grand Am...110hp, pushrods, 4900 rpm redline, 3 speed automatic...this in 1991...

 

I have to go to the gym now but I can't WAIT to respond to this thread.

 

 

i always wondered what ford was thinking with a v6 that had no hp at all

 

All of the above, plus.......

1. Late 70's GM passenger car diesel V-8. GM tried to do it on the cheap and adapt a regular gasoline small block 350 to diesel use. Infernally unreliable, utterly gutless, and smoke spewing, it was a freaking DISASTER. Many industry marketing types still cite that episode as reasons the American public doesn't want passenger car diesels.

2. Pontiac's briefly offered 3.2L iron block 4-cylinder which saw limited application in the Tempest in the early 60's. It was half of a 389 V-8, yet was almost as heavy....had vibrations that destroyed motor mounts within days and zero power. Mercifully killed after just a couple of years.

3. Lincoln's flathead V-12 from 1940 - 1948. Big, heavy, with unsolvable overheating problems and less power than Cadillac's period V-8. An engine so bad it has depressed those cars values in the collector market.

 

Our family's old piece of shit green/tan top Reliant K. It amazes me how my brother got pussy in that thing. Well, that's what he said anyway.... the driver's side door didn't unlock from the outside, and his stories usually involve getting in through the passenger side door, then going back out and opening the passenger door again, for his date

I looked up the stats and it had a 2.2 4-cylinder pushing out an earth-shredding 82 horsepower. I think you could pretty much include any 4-cylinder that the formerly Big 3 plopped in their economy cars.

 

Yugo, 60hp, and after picking it up from the factory personally, my dad had to stop by the mechanic first because something was wrong with the engine. Now that's bad

 

The engines in the town and country are pretty shitty. 3.8L 197 hp V6 and 4.0L 251 hp V6. They are both rated at 16/23. The sienna has a 3.5L 266 hp V6 and is rated at 16/21, and the Odyssey 3.5L 244 hp V6 rated at 16/23.


4.0L that only gets 251 HP is pretty shitty.

 

Mini-van engines have large displacements for torque, the hp ratings aren't as important.

 

Right now I think my FiL would say the V6 in the Land Rover LR2.

He has had one in his shop for months now. Some guy bought it with 10k miles from a dealer...less than a week later the engine dies. My FiL gets its, fixes it, 3 minutes later it blows again.....order the parts....weeks go by (LR makes you get the parts from them.) Fix it again....less than 3 minutes...the engine blows again.

They are still trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with it. Meanwhile poor schmuck with still stuck paying for it...along with a monthly on a rental car.

 

The torque stats aren't much better either.

230 @ 4000 RPM and 259 @ 4200 RPM for the Chrysler. 245 @ 4700 RPM For the Toyota and 245 @ 4900 RPM for the Honda. So much bigger engines yet not much more torque. I just think they could do better and judging by how many I have seen on the road I guess the majority of people think so as well.

 

I had one of the ultimate performance shitboxes: a 1976 Chevy Monza with the 262ci V8 producing a whopping 110hp. I was 17 at the time and I begged and begged my mom for cash so I could put a real 350 small block in it. But no, she thought I would race it and kill myself... typical.

 

I know I'm probably going to burn for this but the Audi/VW 1.8T four banger is a total piece. The thing sludges like a sonofabitch, burns oil, and doesn't put out crap for power, even with the turbo. My Santa Fe feels faster than that thing.

I worked for an Audi dealer for almost two years and saw more 1.8Ts come in for sludge and related problems than any other engine.

 

The 1.9L Inline 4 in my old 87 and 89 Escort was pretty pathetic even by late 80s standards.....it's no wonder Ford threw its hands up and opted for a Mazda Protege derived motor for the 1991MY.

 

Hey Port,
What is the average lifespan of those engines? What is the course of action once you see an engine all sludged up like that, replacement?

 

Ford's 4.6L V8, found in the 97-03 F150's was pretty weak, for a truck motor 202 hp, 252 lb-ft.

Ford's 6.0L PowerStroke Diesel...giant POS that was not even remotely reliable.

GM's 350cid diesel conversion, as mentioned before, was an awesome POS motor.

 

I had one of those. Nearly put me off of Ford trucks. A manager acquaintance of Ford Racing actually apologized to me on behalf of FMC for that poor excuse of an engine.

I think your specifications that you listed for the 4.6 are incorrect, but for the 4.2 V6 instead. I believe the 1997-2001 4.6 was rated at 220-231 hp and 265-293 lb-ft.


Terry

 

I saw them bite it as young as 29ish thousand miles. It's a bit of a four ring :wink: circus to get Audi to cover it. For starters, you have to have records of the car's service from new, can't have skipped more than one oil change (there may be a zero-tolerance policy now, can't remember exactly) and have only used synthetic oil. I saw one sludge up around 58,000 miles and it had been religiously maintained by Audi techs and according to their specs. Audi took that into consideration and despite the car being 8,000 miles and two years out of warranty, paid 90% of it. I think it was a $7,000 bill so those people got off lucky.

Luck of the draw has a lot to do with it. I saw an '02 A4 1.8 Avant with 118,000 miles on the original engine.

 

it all depends what kind of oil ppl put in it, how they drive, and how they maintain the car. Yea they are prone to sludging (Audis and Passats) but if you maintain it properly it's a good engine. My friend has had his jetta for 4 years and put more then 60 000miles on it and it goes like new. He also drives it really hard all the time but he maintains it properly and on time.