[jeffm]

After many years of customers complaining, Chrysler has finally addressed the oil consumption issue on this engine. However, Dart owners will not feel the love. The fix will only be applied to Jeeps

Allpar News - Jeep fix for 2018-2019 2.4 oil consumption

Jeep owners with the 2.4 liter four-cylinder have complained of oil drinking, with the engines sucking in up to a quart every 2,000 miles. What made this especially perplexing was the seemingly random nature of the problem, since some owners had no problems at all, not having to add any oil...

www.allpar.com

 

[Killraven]

"According to a customer rep, the oil is being sucked into the cylinders during deceleration; the solution was to change the software to prevent vacuum from being created in the cylinders at critical times"

That's hard for me to accept as the reason for oil consumption. It clearly gets worse as the years go by and mileage goes up. I still say it's bad/cheap rings installed on the pistons.

I use AutoStick all the time to drop down to 3rd gear around 4k rpms and engine brake. I do it almost daily so I would expect mine to eat oil like crazy, but it's still 1 qt every 3k miles or so. Not perfect but not horrible consumption either.

 

[jsblanch]

"According to a customer rep, the oil is being sucked into the cylinders during deceleration; the solution was to change the software to prevent vacuum from being created in the cylinders at critical times"

That's hard for me to accept as the reason for oil consumption. It clearly gets worse as the years go by and mileage goes up. I still say it's bad/cheap rings installed on the pistons.

I use AutoStick all the time to drop down to 3rd gear around 4k rpms and engine brake. I do it almost daily so I would expect mine to eat oil like crazy, but it's still 1 qt every 3k miles or so. Not perfect but not horrible consumption either.

It's probably fairly complex software. Note the "at critical times" in the rep's response, meaning that a vacuum state might exist at other times. If it was bad piston rings, you would think somebody would have torn an affected engine down and proven it by now, since it's not like this is a rare engine or a rare problem. It's one of their main engine offerings for North America. There's also a link in one of the comments that this fix will probably be rolled out to other vehicles with this engine. Since pretty much every Dart with a 2.4L is out of warranty, we'll see how magnanimous they are.

Even if it is cheap rings, this could still solve the problem, because it might the combination of marginal rings and too much vacuum that is causing oil to get sucked into the engine. Reduce the cylinder vacuum and you reduce the ability of oil to be forced past the rings. Still, it's embarrassing that they didn't figure this out in R&D, especially since the engine took almost 6 months longer to go into production than was planned.

 

[jeffm]

According to a FCA Rep over on the Allpar forums, the Dart will be included in a future phase of the update. You can read the full conversation over here;

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