18th Jan 2021, 20:41

50 miles without any coolant? No. Never. An engine will start having wear after 30 seconds running without coolant assuming the engine is already warm. Heavy damage after 1-2 minutes. It's not all about head gasket and it's not all about piston seizing; heavy wear is also broken piston rings or scratched cylinder wall. So no way the car would drive for 50 miles, not even 20.

24th Jan 2021, 04:16

Nice review.

Question: What did the replacement of the 4 struts cost?

31st Jan 2021, 04:10

Appreciate the insight - helpful :)

3rd Feb 2021, 21:27

$250 CAD in parts I recall, I went with passive struts for back and front instead of the active electric/air ones which would probably cost $1000+ easily. To get rid of the service suspension message on the dash, just had to put some resistors that add up to 4700ohms in the connectors, tape it up, and it looks like it did from the factory. I can't feel a difference in the ride unless on really rough roads where you don't want to take these cars anyways.

5th Feb 2021, 13:01

Well that's actually a fact, some cars can run without coolant. If it overheats it starts shutting down cylinder after cylinder and these will now work to cool the engine, since these cylinder draws cold air otherwise used for combustion.

5th Feb 2021, 21:27

That is true, the "limp" mode was a feature on the Northstar engine, but an obsolete feature.

This still did not prevent the blown head gasket issue where the head bolts backed themselves out of the block due to the bolt thread pattern being too fine. There are repair kits that address this problem at a cost of around 5 grand if a qualified shop performs the repair (if they even want to get into it).

I personally love the last generation Eldorado, but never bought one because of this horrible engine.