My uncle had the 1979 Cutlass diesel 261 and it ran fine for years. I often drove it. He had added a more complex water separating system added at day one of owning this car as you mentioned water in truck diesel was a major destroyer of this engine. The second thing was the need to change oil on very short intervals. You did not need to use very exotic oil, just a good detergent oil. He changed the oil every 1,500 miles and never more than 2,000. It lasted years without any issue and he sold it in 1983. I drove it and got 30 mpg. My V-6 powered 1979 GM full size was sluggish and slow compared to this car which had good throttle response and was faster than a 6 cylinder car of the day. Yes compared to the last GM diesel this one had lots of issues but they could be minimized if you were in the know about the damage water in the fuel did to the injectors and you were really into maintenance.
I ordered a Cutlass in 1983 with the 4.3L V6 and drove the car for about 20 years, by the time I sent it to the junkyard the car had about 275,000 miles. It weighed 3,400 lbs, so was not the fastest, but once up to highway speed it ran fine at 30 mpg+ with the highest being 36. In the lighter Cierra it was higher mpg. I did add a good water separator to it. My brother had an 82 Cierra 4.3L he drove for years. I currently have an 84 Cierra diesel that came from Arizona so the body is solid. Another thing under development was the Tuned Induction V6 diesel. Tests reported 0-60 in Ten Seconds and quarter mile of 17.5 seconds which is faster then stock 4.3's. They reported 101 hp vs the stock 85 hp.
Yeah not too sure that 10 seconds in that Cierra diesel, maybe if you threw it over a cliff at the grand canyon it could drop that fast. Speaking of fast, ever do a Mercedes 220 D automatic with air conditioning and 4 adults , yeah now thats like 10 days 0 to 59.5 mph Did not think it got to 60 mph, The later 240D automatic was equally scary, Ralph Nader could have done a "unsafe because it never gets any speed" They say speed kills, well no speed and a highway short entrance is killer in one, just saying
Hey Adam, it's nice that you picked this very nice tranquil setting to talk about the notorious Oldsmobile diesel engine that has such a horrible reputation!!! Thanks for sharing this informative video!!! 👍👍🙂
I still have three of these cars. Only one still runs. My nephew still drives the 82 Buick Century. It gets 32-36mpg and is extremely comfortable to ride in. The 4.3L V6 is not the worst diesel ever made; it just inherited its big brother's reputation. The V6 was a well built engine. All the problems of its big brother (350 olds diesel) had been fixed by the time it went into production--Good fuel filters, 4 bolt mains, 16 head bolts on a V6 instead the 10 on the V8, heavier block. One of the cars I have has 375,000 miles it and it never had anything done to it other than basic fuilds and filter changes. If the injectors had been replaced at least once in that time, it probably would still be going strong. The heads melted because of VERY wornout injectors. The biggest reason these didn't have morepower than they did is because the EGR valve was right in the middle of the intake and it only had less than an inch clearence all the way around it and they were governor limited to 3100rpm. I removed the EGR on the 82 and cut out the mount, and it was a big improvement in power. The biggest problem with these engines now is parts availiabilty. These would have been an amazing engine with a turbo.
@@greggc8088 heard an old gm beater a few weeks back idle into the gas station, everyone looking. Tbh, it took me a second of listening to tell if it was an iron duke or a diesel. Nope,iron duke😆
In 1980 I bought a VW Dasher wagon diesel and a buddy of mine bought an Olds Cutlass diesel wagon. I got nothing but bashing on how slow small and everything else compared to his Olds diesel , I drove his Olds several times and began to wonder if I didn't make the right choice on a diesel wagon over the Olds. This bashing went on for a couple years till one morning his wife took out of their drive way up a fairly steep hill and the Olds pitched a rod through the side of the block at 60,000 mi. My VW went on to surpass 200K miles and I received no more VW bashing out of my friend after the big explosion. Also by then the reputation was so bad he didn't even bother to put a new engine in the car to fix it. It went to the junk yard.
The VW diesels of that era were no prize, either. My family had an '80 Dasher Diesel. It tossed a rod through the side of the block at 80K miles. It was the nicest looking car in the junkyard.
@@alantrimble2881 the 1.5 till 1980 wasnt that great of an engine ,the westys with that 1.6 from 81 up was alot better. You gotta rev em some , the 1.5 even more. I remember thousands of times when dad was driving mom's 81 rabbit ,he drove it like he stole it and it loved it. Approach a hill in 4th gear, and when the speed drops to the redline of 3rd on the speedo ,drop it in 3rd and let it sit at redline for however long the hill is. It could be 5-6mi long, let it eat. That car went over 200k before i put another 40 on it. You could brick the gas and it'll sit there all day at 5400 and do nothing. I used to scare my friends by bricking the gas for 5 mins at a shot in neutral just to see em trip out. Yeah ,it's governed, but 5400 isnt exactly slow.
Sad I. Ultimately took one down to the bones and used modern diesel upgrades! I solved alot of the issues they suffered from. Have had no issues reaching 188,947 miles on it cranks first time never had and failures. I drive hwy mostly and some city
@@alantrimble2881VW Diesels in the 80’s weren’t very good - forty-ish horsepower with a timing belt and a weak head gasket. At that time, Mercedes was king of Passenger car Diesels, with MFI Peugeot as a close second.
People make fun of GM for trying to turn a gas engine into a diesel. However the fact is that most companies that make both gas and diesel engines will try to reuse as many parts between them as possible. Also I read somewhere that GM thought they had a new process that would have made the engine strong enough w/o adding more head bolts, but in practice it didn't work the way they thought it would. I think in reality the olds diesels were just another example of 80's GM forcing their customers to beta test their products.
It's better to do it the other way ,like Cummins. A C series cones to mind. They convert em to gassers by swapping pistons and heads basically. It's best to start with a diesel to make a decent gasser,not the other way around. And even then, they took a perfectly good diesel engine and ruined it with spark plugs🤦 Haha I'm not a big fan of em , because it's not a diesel but they work great.
I made a mound of money repairing the diesel injection pumps on 5.7 and 4.3 O’diesels. In late 70s through 84 when there were lots of them on the road and GM covered the pumps. I worked at a Chev and then Buick dealer. The diesel pump shop charged too much so the GM brands in the town sent them to me. My service manager and the IRS loved me those years. The elastomer damper ring that took shock out of the drive to governor weight cage would harden and fragment and then the bits plugged up ports and they quit. I did loads of engine repairs too but that was not as lucrative as injection pumps removed, fixed, and installed in a little over 1 1/2 hours for a little over 4 hours pay.
Ah yeah ,I still came across some of those in the late 90s. The engine shop (which was full in house EVERYTHING) I worked at used to do a fair amount of big 3 diesel pickup repairs. Ol stanadyne pumps weren't too bad except that ring. While working there I got enough guts to repair a Bosch ve of mine. After that ,it was all downhill on my VW turbodiesels ,tweaking em to the moon for a 25-30% increase in power 😁
@@MrTheHillfolk oh VW.... a perfect car.... TOTALLY F-ED because of 1 stupid thing only motor ive ever blown up was in a VW.....was a touregg (or whatever) . it has an oil TEMP!!! guage..... in a "soccer mom" SUV.......... but ONLY an "idiot light" for oil PRESSURE!!! . . my family has health issues (diabetes.... my dad and sister.... but it "skipped" me..... at least so far) so we would always have to drive 320 miles to billings montana (as my town of 2300, while "large" for MT.... doesnt have the specalist Drs) . ANYWAY..... to make some money..... we would drive cars back from the auction house..... for a used car lot owner we were friends with but this VW was at the used car lots "mechanic's" house.... . . we get their and i pop the hood and start checking fluids "oh, dont worry.... ive checked it all" . "then why is it a quart low on oil....... and the coolant overflow bottle seems to have oil/water mix around it??" . "oh, thats probably from the pressure wash..... ill get you a quart of oil" *brings me a quart of some blue "compression in a can"...... that poured like water* . "uh..... ok.... i asked for oil....... if everything is OK, why does it need this??" "i dont have any 5w-30.........." (what mechanic doesnt have 5w-30???) . . so he dumps it in....... and we take off . . about 20 miles from his house..... i start to hear the lifters ticking so a pop it into neutral (removing load and RPM from the engine......and trying to listen to make sure im hearing correctly) . the SECOND it shifts into neutral...... KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK then.... AFTER 10 SECONDS OF IT KNOCKING!!!...... ONLY THEN!!!!.... did the low oil PSI light come on . . . but the oil temp was perfectly fine..... thanks VW you stupid fucks . . . . . . the oil pump "drive shaft" runs through a coolant passage..... you have ~40 PSI oil..... and ~15 psi coolant . so when the seal fails..... 40 PSI - 15 = oil in your coolant (which is why i saw the "sludge" by the coolant recovery tank) . . . i should have known better...... but dude is a "mechanic"...... and im not familiar with VW engines however.... i NEVER believed it was from the pressure washer...... ESPECIALLY when he brought me that "compression in a can" BS . i just expected a pretty good oil leak..... not a seal TOTALLY failing, blowing every last drop into the cooling system in about 3 seconds.... . . . . . . if you can tell me why..... in a SOCCER MOM SUV!!!!....... why oil temp is MORE important than oil PSI i will go buy a VW right now...... take out a loan with my 322 credit score and everything . . its an SUV with a v8..... cool..... but not a FUCKING RACE CAR!!! (and race cars have BOTH!! temp and PSI!!!)
I was a tech at the only GM dealership in Canada that sold all GM models: Chev, Pontiac, Olds, Buick, Cadillac, Corvette, LD trucks, MD trucks, HD trucks. Eventuelly ran our HD truck garage and we worked on all these powerplants. We found that the blocks themselves didnt have the strength to withstand the compression pressures and we suffered with these diesel powerplants until the 6.2/6.5 which were true diesel blocks, with apprpriate lower block strength. Great channel, thanks for your on-going effort.
Except for the undersized starter bolts, and not enuff meat to drill and rethread one size larger, and the oft discarded little front starter triangulation bracket
My older friend Stan, who was an engineer back in the late 1970's said "if there is a cheaper way to do GM will find it." This was not a compliment. My parents had three diesel cars back in the late 70's/early 80's. A 1977 Peugeot 504 sedan, a 1979 Olds Delta 88 sedan (3.5L V-8 - first generation diesel), and a 1981 Olds Cutlass Supreme Couple (5.7L V-8 - second generation diesel). The engine in the Delta 88 blew up with 48,000 miles on it. GM split the cost on the replacement engine. That engine lasted until the mother of our neighbor, who bought the car from us, killed the engine (either running it without coolant or oil - I don't recall which). The 1981 Cutlass had the better engine, but the tranny went and the Lee Miles shop replaced it with the infamous Turbo200 tranny (more on this later). The other problem with the 1981 was that if the car sat between 2-4 hours it would not restart. The computer thought the engine was warm enough to start without the glow plugs, but it wasn't. After 4 hours the glow plugs came on and the car started up again. In 1986 Dad had a mechanic replace the diesel with a used Olds 350 V-8 gas engine, with a four barrel carburetor. That's when we found out about the tranny scam. The best things about the GM diesels were: 1; The noise. People hanging out in the street gave way when they heard the diesel coming. No need for the horn. 2; After a few years the injectors in the replacement diesel in the 1979 Delta 88 needed replacement themselves. As a result the car smoked heavily when the pedal was floored. On day a person was riding my bumper as we passed some police activity. Once safely past I floored it, resulting in a black cloud of soot erupting in the face of the tailgater. When the cloud cleared he was nowhere to be seen. I wonder if the soot stalled his engine?
Chevrolet Vega... I ordered a 72 wagon in the fall of 71. At 9000 miles it was burning a quart of oil every 450 miles and the Chevrolet dealer told me that was normal. I was 26 yo, not knowing how to complain further. I owned the car for 27 years. At about 120,000 miles it was on it's third engine. Everything else of the car was wonderful. Great handling with it's wide oval tires and (ordered) lsd rear end. No electrical issues, never changed the oil on it's Opel four speed manual. 80,000 miles on a set of Michelins due to great alignment.
I've been in sheer ecstasy with all the Oldsmobiles diesel talk on your channel lately Adam.... Great content....good or bad, people need to know the history of Olds Diesels.....
I am driving an 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera Brougham Holiday with a 4.3L V6 diesel. It has aluminum heads on it, get 38 mpg(Hwy 75mph) has very good pick up for a naturally aspirated diesel. I also have a 1981 Riviera with the 350 5.7L V8 diesel and I had a 1982 Oldsmobile Toronado 5.7L diesel that had 484,000 miles on it when it got rid of it. I never had any head gasket issues, I changed the oil every 3000 miles religiously used only Kendal D3 30, when Amoco was around their Premier Diesel fuel, changed a lot of water pumps, couple radiators, A/C compressors and a few starters and that was it. But I also knew I wasn’t driving a Corvette, I drove it like a diesel, let it warm up a couple minutes on first start up, if I got off the highway after a long drive I’d let it idle a couple minutes before shutting it off. It’s like driving your couch down the street! There was a lot of blame to go around, GM had to know an engine with a 22.5:1 compression ratio and pistons that decked out had to be clamped tightly conversely customers (not all but many) didn’t really read up on their new Diesel engine, they would use dry gas(anhydrous alcohol) when they got water in their fuel, next thing they knew their IP failed, all the gaskets had broken apart from the dry gas. They weren’t putting the correct oil in the engines, they required SF/CC or SF/CD rated oil, and they’d use regular “gas” engine rated oil, crank bearing would go, cams would wear , cylinders were scored, or they would use a weight not recommended in the winter and the engine didn’t get the correct lubrication. However, if you took care of them, drove it as a diesel, you could get a reliable car out of the “DX” blocks, and ARP made a stud kit that fixed the weak head bolt design, the “D” blocks with non roller lifters, pencil injectors, return lines(that always seemed to leak) were always problematic. It is pretty funny the stares I get, or that ever popular statement I seemed to get, “you better put some oil in it before your engine seizes” um no it’s a diesel, “no it’s not” “a GM”, yeah and well Oldsmobile seems to think it is! I’d post a picture but I guess it won’t let you
If GM was smart, they would’ve worked on improving Isuzu Turbo Diesels (what they ultimately sort of did with the DuraMax) but in terms of optimizing them for larger, heavier American passenger cars. Either that, or license the OM617 Turbo from Mercedes, or one of the MFI Peugeot Turbo Diesels.
Thank you Adam, what memories resurface from my 15 years watching your video, it reminds me of my father's purchase of the brand new 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 diesel 5.7L, newly built in Michigan and delivered to Baie-Comeau Qc. Seeing the discussions on the internet, I see that the reliability issues were different for us, a fuel water detector was installed by the dealer, a fuel injection pump bleed done by a Detroit Diesel engine tech, and the preventive maintenance according to the owner's manual was always done. Our Oldsmobile was very reliable for the first 5 years, my parents drove smoothly and were careful with their car. But after a 400 mile drive home on Christmas Day 1984, a few miles from home, a "boom" was heard in the engine, and the engine noise became louder. The next morning at home in -20C (-4F), that was the end of it, a bearing cap mount broke as well as the crankshaft. A new engine was installed at the expense of GM Canada, knowing the reliability of the 5.7L :)
Unfortunately the ‘78 & ‘79 they hadn’t made the bolts longer in the “D” blocks and sometimes it would tear the crank right out of the engine, by 1980 they had corrected that issue.
I had to read all the comments posted thus far before making my own. I bought a 1982 Regal with the 4.3 litre diesel back in 1991. The car had 73,000 miles on it. It needed an injection pump rebuild. The car itself was immaculate. So I got the injection pump rebuilt and the car ran great! ...for a while. The car slowly started losing power and I soon found myself having to add transmission fluid to the fuel to give it enough power to get out of its own way. Replacement engine parts soon became obsolete and I was having to improvise and was changing starter motors every 15,000 miles or so. Bosch made an aftermarket starter that would have costed $260 to purchase, which would've been insane at the time. The highlight of the car and engine was that at one time I had the car up to approximately 120 MPH on a lonely stretch of highway and the car sailed along like a dream! Eventually the starter went out and at 132,000 miles I pulled the engine. It's interesting though that the car has a 2.56 end gear ratio to accommodate the amount of torque and still give it the mileage it got. I have a 3.8 gasoline engine that I still have yet to put in the car, but to compensate the taller gears am adding a 4 barrel carburetor and manifold. It's been an interesting learning experience. The Regal is a beautiful car, and I wouldn't have it had it not been that it came with the diesel engine.
@@douglasb.1203 they had both. The 4.3 was very rare as they only put about a thousand of them in the G body rear wheel drive cars, and I happen to have one of them.
@@mikehasemann9270 since the typical end gear ratio is 3.23:1 for a 3.8 litre V6, I'm compensating the engine with a little more intake. It's almost like being in overdrive when I hit third gear, and the quadrajet will give it a little more for startoffs.
I never heard anything bad about the V6 diesel in the front drive cars. The few I saw back then actually sounded and ran better than the 5.7 on its best day.
I bought a used 1978 Cutlass diesel from a co-worker for like $250 about 25 years ago. I got it cheap because it had two head bolts that broke at the cap. It was the 350 ci. I replaced the head gasket and the head bolts and the two batteries and drove it for a few months back and forth to work. Sometimes at a stop, the engine would just die and would not crank over. Waiting a few minutes, it would crank back up like nothing happened. I finally gave in after a starter bolt broke off in the threads. I sold it for what I paid for it to a teenage neighbor. The neighbor was fully aware of the repair history.
We were raising 6 kids and not much money so I bought many nice GM cars with all kinds of the diesels for not much money. Mostly cheap fixes- injector pumps , rocker arms , head gaskets we drove em til they died and then found another - Cadillacs , Buicks and olds mostly
In the mid-late 70's I was an HD truck technician for a beer & wine distributor. We ran both gasoline and diesel powered delivery and over the road trucks. The owner was very politically involved and we had just gone through a gasoline crisis. We had our own 10,000 gallon regular gasoline and diesel fuel tanks on site and he was bound and determined not to have to worry about purchasing unleaded gasoline for his own vehicles so.............Cadillac Sedan deVille with the Old 5.7L Diesel. He showed up at the shop grinning ear to ear with his diesel powered Cadillac and had me fill the tank. I told him his wife wasn't going to like the exhaust fumes when he started the car in the garage. Within a few days he gave the the diesel Caddy to his sales manager as his new company car. The word was that his wife wouldn't let him park it in the garage........
We had an '81 Buick Regal with the 350 diesel. In the five years we owned it we replaced the transmission 3 times and the engine once. When the heads went on the second engine my folks said goodbye to GM forever and switched to Fords. The Buick was very comfortable and got great mileage on the then cheaper diesel fuel, but it certainly wasn't durable. It also had a mix of both SAE and metric bolts on engine accessories, making it fun to replace belts. About 10 years after trading it in, I saw it one day driving around in the Central Valley of California, pretty far from our home, so it was quite the coincidence. Whoever owned it had bought a crate 350 and converted it to gas.
Diesel cheaper then. Imagine running one of these today withe Diesel at $6. Probably cost slightly less than all the Cummies & Powerstrokes. Dumb consumers.
My friend has one (a 350) in an 82 Toronado. Still running somehow with over 500,000 miles on it. It does have ARP head studs but besides that and roller tip rockers the rest of the engine is completely stock. Still gets 40 mpg on the highway and runs on whatever waste oil is thrown in the tank. It especially likes 0w-20 as fuel. Of course not as engine oil, it only takes straight 50 or 20w-50. But still runs like a top doing 100+ miles a week.
My Grandfather was a Ford guy his whole life, but he strayed once when he bought a new 1980 Cutlass 5.7L diesel wagon, complete with the woodgrain exterior. He was keen on the diesel fuel economy, and as a teen I thought it was a pretty nice car. But, he had to have the head gaskets done under warranty, and several other repairs as well. He gave up on the diesel Cutlass after only two years and went back to Ford, buying an LTD Country Squire wagon. His comment at the time was "GM sure got egg on their face with that diesel".
Enjoy the video but small correction; A diesel engine compresses only the air. Not Aaron fuel like a gasoline engine. Fuel is injected once compression is complete. Or at least almost complete
I was about to point this out and decided to look to see if someone else beat me to it. It's the hot intake air charge (from being compressed) that ignites the injected fuel in a diesel.
Yes. 22-1. Back in the Day; however modern diesels now have compression ratios that are much lower. Usually below 16-1. At the same time gasoline direct injected engines are raising their ratios, normally over 13-1. Not that much of a difference anymore
@@kevinbarry71 Couple of comments: One of the reasons the Olds diesel had an exceptionally high compression ratio was because it used a Recardo pre-chamber design. Virtually all modern diesels are turbo-charged and are not pre-chamber designs, hence the reduced compression ratios. Turbo-charged gas engines typically have lower compression ratios than their naturally aspirated counterparts.
@@Gary7even not exactly, back then that was standard compression ratio. And a turbo charger wouldn't lower it much if at all. The reason the ratios were so high was because the injector pump produced very low pressure compared to today's versions and the injectors were primitive. These days the fuel is under so much more pressure atomizes much much better and thus ignites easier and burns much cleaner
Well, sir, I understand about engineering headcount (I have worked for NASA, Cessna, JPL etc. (I am a researcher)) but most of GM's problems were their own. If they had elected to start work on obvious upgrades that were needed instead of relying on banks of lawyers and huge political contributions to avoid having to change they would not have had the problems and our country would have been a lot healthier and wealthier. It's also too bad a good little engine got caught in the backlash, obviously is they had got it out first instead of doing a backyard level conversion to the V8 things would have worked very differently. I have considerable respect for GM engineers and I suspect that GM management had no real desire for this to work out, they knew that if the cars they made were just terrible then congress would be able to use that as an excuse to write different laws for them versus other countries, which the Congress did. It is only now 30+ years later that American cars have begun to recover from what Detroit management did. At that Tesla's success is not because of lazy American workers or unions or etc, it is simply that Detroit lost the ability to plan ahead or even realize which way the wind was blowing and did it to the nation again (thankfully someone outside their management 'training' system was around to help the move to the EV's)
It is a measure of GM’e managerial incompetence that it could have some of the world’s best engineers, and still fail to deliver quality engines for around 20 years!!
3.5 eco boost carbon on intake valves due to DI 5.7 hemi.... changed lifter angle... leading to no lube to cam till ~1500 rpm is reached (same design flaw on all 5 generations of the 5.7/6. hemi) 6.0 and 6.4 power stroke..... need i say more? VW v8.... oil pump "drive shaft" runs through a coolant passage..... leading to ALL the oil being pumped into the coolant in about 3 seconds when the seal fails (and it WILL fail) VW also has an oil temp gauge.... on their soccer mom SUV......... but no oil PSI gauge . and the 5.4 spark plug SAGA!!! first it was too many threads...... and, typical ford, trying to re-invent things that worked for ~100 years..... like the spark plug then it was too FEW threads and they would blow out.... but AT LEAST it was a normal spark plug (proving the 5.4 didnt need re-invented spark plugs to work... or pass emissions) . . . like.... their isnt a DAMN THING wrong with GMs v8s from 1955 to 2022 . AFM sure..... but a simple OBD "dongle" fixes that
@@kainhall I have heard that all DI engines carbon up their valves, not just Ecoboost. As to GM v-8s, there have been issues with valves failing in recent years. Older(pre-2000) GM and Ford V-8s were ok(except the GM diesel-I have had friends with these horrible things) I have driven 2 Ford Rangers many miles, over 170,000(totaled by rear end collision) and 250,000. These had the 2.3 four cylinder and the 3.0 V-6. No real issues. My wife had a Ford Escort that went 240,000, but it had a Mazda engine. I have heard about the other Ford engine issues you mention, but never owned these.
I had a relative who owned a 1985 Oldsmobile 98 Regency Brougham Coupe with the ultra rare 4.3 liter Diesel. He was fairly wealthy so he only kept the car for about 3 years before trading it back into the Oldsmobile dealer on a Touring sedan. But.. I did get to ride in the car several times before he sold it and it ran beautifully. I was a young teen at the time but i knew these diesels were fairly rare even back then, especially in the new C body cars. As i know, he never had any issues with it's durability during his 3 years of ownership.
I owned a 1980 Cutlass 5.7L diesel. This engine was replaced with a Goodwrench 5.7L diesel before I bought the car. This diesel never once left me stranded. It always started and ran well. Not the fastest but for $500 bucks I didn't complain. The lockup torque converter had a dimmer switch hooked up to it so the lockup mode was manually controlled. I could actually stall the diesel coming to a stop without unlocking the converter. Aside from being somewhat slow on acceleration the 5.7 diesel was a decent engine in my experience.
Never saw a 4.3 diesel. BUT I did work on an 82 Buick Regal that originally did have 1 in it. The owner swapped a 4.1L Buick 4bbl and 200r4 trans into it at some point. He really did a great job ( or somebody did). Correct engine and computer harness as well as updated ECM and PROM. Because it was still registered as a diesel, he never had to go for emissions.
Had a good buddy who cherished his Century 4.3. He 4-speed swapped it, totally redid the engine, even so far as running Harland Sharp roller rockers. Aftermarket fuel filtration kept it alive. It ran pretty good for what it was. Till it lost an oil cooler and shelled the crank.
@@typrus6377 I would have to see it to believe it. I could understand a Pontiac 6000STE which came available from factory with a manual if I'm not mistaken. But a Buick Century? Was it originally equipped with a floor shifter or column shifter? Which transmission did he use, to bolt it up to? I know these are some in depth questions, but I'm having trouble picturing it. My mom had an '84 Buick Century with the 2.8L V6 and three speed auto so I remember how these cars look very well.
@@michaelchan8915 He took the Muncie out of a 6000 or a Celebrity. I remember he had to do something interesting with the pedal group and tunnel to mount the shifter. He also had to have the flywheel custom machined to fit the engine, and turned down the ring gear mounting.
What killed the Oldsmobile diesel engines was the bean counter involvement. The first thing they did was remove the water fuel separator from the equation. Talk about stupid. I have seen a 5.7 Oldsmobile diesel in a pickup that had a John Deere fuel filtration system retrofitted to it with stronger head bolts installed. It gave up the ghost at 486,000+ miles. Most stock 5.7s were lucky to make it past 100,000 miles without a catastrophic failure.
I have a British friend at work, who asked me why diesel engines haven't caught on in Canada/USA, for cars. I said "Oldsmobile diesel", and explained what a lemon it was. It poisoned the perception of diesel in North America for decades. You make a good point, Adam, in this and other videos. I complain about malaise era North American cars, but as you point out, they were under the gun with fuel economy standards, and were asked to do an awful lot in a short time. That could not have been easy.
Its because of the US having stricter clean air laws, paticularly with nitrous oxides. The eu pushed diesel forever and now theyre paying for it with smog.
@@turnne Mercedes were much better but not as good as the Japanese. I remember my uncle who lived in San Diego. After driving lower end cars for his whole life decided to get a Cadillac, a diesel (early 80's). It had so many problems the dealer allowed him a great trade on another Cadillac. This one was also unreliable, so he sold it at a loss and purchased a Mercedes diesel. While this was much better, it too started to give him problems. When it was a couple of years old he traded it in on a Lexus LS 400 (at introduction in 1989). Once he bought that he was a Lexus customer for life.
@@cgmoog Well the Japanese didnt have luxury cars at the time. That was more late 80 and early 90's with Acura and Lexus that had come to market Mercedes had the M617 diesel engine in the early 80's and it was legendary with reliability
It’s funny you said “lemons”, but the Olds 5.7L diesel is responsible for the “Lemon Law” that we have today, because of that engine this law was born!
I've never owned the 4.3 V6 diesel nor have I ever actually seen one in person but I've often heard that they really were not that terrible because when they finally came available the engineers had solved most of the issues the early 5.7's had. I've owned 3 of the v8 olds diesels, 2 5.7 both the "DX" iteration and 1 4.3 v8, both 5.7 engines were pretty good and mostly trouble free but the 4.3 was in an 82 cutlass supreme and quickly got replaced with a Buick 430 I had on hand because it could not get out of it's own way! One of the 5.7 engines was in an 81 custom cruiser and even had an aftermarket turbocharger on it... It was a great car and it got used for a whole lot of camping trips! Wish I hadn't sold it or could find another one like it. The other one I owned was in an 84 Delta 88 and I got to drive that car for a whole week before some numbskull stole it and it was never seen again.
Somebody STOLE your GM 5.7 Diesel Delta 88? WOW! I never heard of such a thing, most people couldn't even give them away for free! (just to clarify, I too had a 5.7, as I once owned a 1980 Bonneville Wagon. Loved that car! This was before "rolling coal" was a thing, but it was sure fun to do when anyone tailgated you. Drop it into 2nd and have a good laugh! It went about 125K then the engine just started unraveling at a red light, while I was waiting to make a left turn)
@@johndaniels651 Not long after it was stolen there was a guy with a tow truck that was arrested because he was stealing cars by towing them away and scrapping them. I'm pretty sure that's where it went, either that or someone who just didn't know any better took it. It definitely takes a special type of person to want to own an olds diesel.
I drove a Cutlass Ciera with 4.3L diesel at the GM Proving Ground. It drove nice and was actually a little quicker than a similar car with the 2.5L Iron Duke. There were actually plans put the 4.3L diesel into the 1985 M van (Astro/Safari), but that combination was axed before it went into production.
Any chance I could ask you a few questions about you driving the 4.3 at the prooving grounds? I'm an oldsmobile diesel history buff and trying to always collect now info when I can find it!
I believe having the injection timing badly off can produce extreme forces and pressures in a Diesel engine that can quickly destroy even a decent design Diesel engine such as were used in commercial vehicles
Yes. Each division made it's own V8 350. This led , SOMEHOW, to the big recall in late 76 of a large number of mostly Buicks which wound-up with Chevrolet 350s. My aunt bought a new Century Regal in 76 and in a few months recieved her notice. It was late in 76 so the 77s were on the lots and she took the car back and the dealer traded her straight across for a new 77 Regal.
In the 80's these cars were a bargain and most were really clean ! we used to pull the diesels out for the iron and hot rod them out with small block chevy 350 combos and some 454's alot of my builds are still.racing to this day !
I bought in 1983 a Chevelle SS 396 4 speed Muncie with a pristine green with the white racing stripe for a $1000, yes 1972 definitely brought an end to a great time of American automobiles and if you're not American you'll never understand
@@hynestimothy411 Nice. My neighbor here says he bought a '67 Chevelle SS new, and sold it in '74 for $1500. He said it had maybe 45,000 miles on it. It was just a used car back then.
This 4.3L diesel V6 was actually reliably much better than its parent the 5.7L diesel V8, not least since the 4.3L had more head bolts per cylinder plus all the other remedies the 5.7L diesel had since the 1981 model year.
In 1988 someone traded in a 85 Ciera Brogham 4.3 diesel with a "rod knock". I bought the car for a very cheap price and it turned out to be a drippy injector causing the knock! It got great mileage after that and was a decent car. As far as the 4.3 V8 diesel it was an absolute slug! A one year only engine and I'll bet very few survive.
My neighbors bought a brand new Ciera diesel in the mid '80s. Noisy and gutless. It shook so much at idle that the instrument pamel was literally falling out if it! The owners got their money's worth out if it, though. They kept it for at least 10 years and nearly 150k miles. They drove it with a blown head gasket for their last 2 years of ownership, then sold it for scrap.
In my opinion, Olds gas engines prior to '77 had a distinct sound. A Delta 88 did not sound like an Impala. I was in high school when several of my friends parents purchased the Olds diesel. Unfortunately for most, it caused them to abandon the brand once they got rid of the car.
It's like you say Adam, GM used the customers for R&D. They must have known that the original 4 head bolt design was never going to work out, along with a lack of water separator. I'm sure engineers reported these issues with these original designs. Did upper management just not want to hear these warnings in favor of getting this stuff "to market" and saving money? I still can't understand why the powerful car industry did not have enough political pull to soften the CAFE regulations to give them more time for R&D so that the initial products would be more reliable/robust. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the customers lost to these initial disasters would never come back to GM, no matter how good the products might be, and you can not blame them. I would certainly behave the same way, cars a major expense. Why gamble on an "improved GM product" when there were so many good/great foreign alternatives. Don't get me wrong, some sort of "CAFE" mandate was needed for the good of the earth, but the playing field was surely stacked against the domestic automakers. Upper managements' decisions to rush untested engines with known issues to market, surely helped kill GM I only wish that OMC, the company I worked for (Evinrude/Johnson) would have taken the time to learn from all the automakers errors. Our initial "smog outboards" were the same thing, untested with known issues. These disasters killed our dealer network and loyal customer base.
These blunders break my heart for sure. All these horrible "mistakes" not only led to the downfall of the US automakers, but to killing our economy and the loss of decent jobs for so many
Management thought(probably somewhat correctly) that customers couldn't handle the specific maintenance a diesel requires. The solution was just to eliminate the water separator. Diesel was notoriously dirty back then and the water ruined the injector pumps and caused hydro lock pushing the heads off the block(stripping head bolts, blowing gaskets).
@@metrawatt OK, well I understand that concern. Diesels are surely not for everybody, but they do require some very specific maintenance. So, management's answer was to just eliminate the filter? That doesn't make any sense. Trying to educate/screen potential buyers before the purchase would have been a better decision, steering folks back to gas engines that did not want to make the commitment to diesel service procedures.
I was working as a mechanic at the Ford dealer during this time and we were learning to work on the International 6.9 which was relatively new. Before anyone says the IH 6.9 was better than the Olds 5.7 diesel; no, the 6.9 was NOT better. They leaked oil, leaked coolant, the glow plug electrical system frequently burned up, and they were a dog. But the 6.9 got better over time. I had a friend that worked at Holiday Buick and Olds during that time, George made a fortune overhauling Roosa Master injector pumps used on the 4.3 and 5.7 Olds diesels. He did this on the side and through the shop. I don't know where he sourced the parts (this was long before the internet) but he sure had a good connection. The only catch was he made the customer purchase and have a Racor water separator installed as part of the deal. I know George made enough money off his injector pump gig to purchase a beautiful Delta 88 for his wife. Another thing that turned people off diesel engines at that time was there were few gas stations that sold diesel fuel. Not many men were real comfortable sending their wife to a truck stop to fill up.her Olds Cutlass. I heard more than one guy share stories about their wife's experience getting fuel.
U have to be a trucker to know what goes on at truck stops ;-) . Maybe a Honda civic ISNT a bad choice for your 17 y/o daughter considering what goes on at a truck stop!
The converted 5.7 liter Diesel engines should be by far the biggest anchor motors of all time. My dad had a beautiful Chevrolet truck except for the garbage under the hood. Blown head gasket was it’s middle name.
I had the misfortune of using an Olds company car with that 350 diesel. The exhaust smoke was horrible. The engine blew up and it never ran again. Got a new non-diesel and was very happy😊
I had a 84 buick century fwd 4.3 diesel wagon and that thing gave me vertically no issues over 9 years and put it up to 374 k miles and was running fine when sold and yes it had a water seporator on it did have a trans done at about 200k miles bit that car got a solid 40 mpg on the open road at 60 mph best I ever got 45 mpg across the flat mid west traval. Wish I still had it today actually . lol. And that v6 responded much better than the v8 diesels if you floored it it went it was surprising really it would burn the front tires in first gear. Not sure why it was so responsive maybe a different cam profile from the v8 version ? And the torque was at such low rpm compared to that gas engines too. It would pull our tent trailer effortlessly as well . only thing I ever did to that engine was one water pump and air filter. Just oil changes literally , no injectors or pump cost of maintenance was almost zero over 9 years . just one trans rebuild at 200 k which is typical of any GM fwd trans and couple sets of tire's and I think only one break job as well maybe 2 can't remember for sure. If I could find a low mileage one again I would buy it hands down for sure . 👍 then buy all the nos parts I could Posibly find just in case cause the parts house is going find anything these days I'm guessing the hardest thing to find is the injector pump . but they are easily rebuilt though. With common parts for the 350 v8 . but honestly I think it was a grate engine , oh exhaust manifolds one would want to have an extra set of them for sure they were prone to cracking I guess but mine never did 👍 honestly GM finally got all the teething issues sorted on these things Basicly and then put the thing out of production but then GM is kinda famous for doing that with stuff . what ever happened at gm in 1971 kinda led them to that practice over all with R&D . so it seems.
7:00 you say you used to work for GM. Diesel engine don't compress fuel with the air. Air is compress alone. Fuel is injected after the air is compressed. 7:15 VW used the same number of head bolts on their gas and diesel engines.
My grandparents had two 4.3 diesel cars; '84 Celebrity and an '84 Old Cutlass Ciera. The Cutlass was't bad, and the Celebrity actually lasted for years. Also, one of my best buddies from High School's parents had an '84 Cutlass Supreme with the 4.3 diesel. By the time we graduated high school (92), it lasted over 200K miles. Purely anecdotal, as we all know these were not stellar engines, but it was strange that the only 3 cars I knew of in that era, all were fairly reliable.
Yeah, Adam I've just learned > From you, Diesel Engine: 4.3? Never knew V-6, or the V-8. I've owned a '96 Chevy Caprice Classic with a L-99 4.3 V-8, and I knew Chevy made a 4.3 V-6, now I learn about this 4.3 DIESEL? > WOW:! Hey congrats. you've blown past the 50K,,,,, like a rocket!
"Like being valedictorian of your reform school..." I love it. Couldn't GM have gotten something suitable and proven from their European division? It may have been small, but maybe usable in some car lines?
The 4.3 V6 in the smaller FWD cars do actually drive good... plenty of power in town....takes off easily, very unlabored in town...labored on the interstate above 65 mph...
Gee.. can't imagine why Oidsmobile went from top-seller to dead in 25 years. - 5.7 diesel - 4.3 V8 diesel - Quad 4 sans balance shafts All of these directly connected to the Oldsmobile brand. Plus, the cars that did work got replaced by tinny, plasticky front-drive cars that weren't all that different from Buick or Pontiac. So the fan base couldn't buy the cars they wanted, and nobody who wasn't already an Oldsmobile fan was frankly all that interested. The Aurora and Intrigue were nice cars that pointed towards Oldsmobile' re-establishing a place in the market, but the product development cash ran bare and that was it. One wonders what GM could've done with the $5 billion they threw away on the Saturn experiment, and re-invested in development of the remaining products. Might that have gotten the W platform to market before the Taurus - and with proper airbags at launch? Could that have put a proper 4-speed auto throughout the front-drive lineup? Could GM have thrown more money at the interiors, suspension tuning, braking, and build quality?
Of all of the Challenges faced by GM, Ford, and Chrysler during those malaise years - I think it was their massive size that most affected their struggle in changing their entire lineup. Combine that with management and union issues it's a miracle that they survived. I worked at major GM dealership for ~ 20 years through this era of change, and I can promise you that a lot of us were screaming at GM for all the bad decisions and bad product that resulted. Sadly, a lot of the misery could have been avoided.
An interesting diesel olds developed but never released was a V5 diesel. I think it was targeted for 1983 or 84 but was cancelled. I recall reading about the development but it was quietly cancelled.
Our local police department ran Delta 88 diesels. They didn't stand up to police duty. They also ran Chevy Citations. The city had a lawsuit against GM for the durability issues.
My family had a couple of the c10s with the 4.3 and 5.7 diesels. One thing we ran into alot is torque converter failure and transmission problems. I think the low end torque of the diesels didn't play well with the 700R transmission and torque converters they had from the gas engines.
What I find funny is that the Lincoln’s had a BMW I6 Diesel which was also very problematic yet nobody mentions it. Is it because it wasn’t as common? Or because GM advertised theirs so much? Or maybe because people have justly negative bias/ feelings for malaise era US engineering
It’s sad that BMW managed to fuck-up an in-line six-cylinder Diesel. That should be the easiest engine layout possible to get right. Especially for BMW.
Well, I’ll be damned. I’m a pretty big GM guy, and I used to be pretty into 4.3s, and I NEVER knew there was a 4.3 diesel. Sounds like it sucks, but still, I would’ve thought I’d have read about it or something. Cool, thanks!
That's how bad they were. They didn't want you to know there was others besides the 350 so they didn't write about them, because there's nothing to write home about 😁
I learned to drive, in part, in an Oldsmobile Delta 88 diesel. It was quite an adventure. My college roommate told me we couldn’t run out of gas, because it was a huge hassle to get the car running again. It was clattery and slow, which didn’t make sense to me, since it was a 350 V8, until I learned that diesel engines had different power properties altogether. Sadly, another example of GM, or any American car company, coming up with a quick fix to a big problem, which yielded larger problems in the long run.
I bought a 1978 Olds Delta 88 with the 350 cu. in. diesel. At first it was a delight to drive but after a year or so quality problems arose. The gear shift pointer of the steering column no longer lined up with the letters PRND21. The state inspection failed me on that. Another quality issue; the headlights would turn off when I would hit the brakes. The dealer told me that the wiring for the headlights was routed in front of the second battery and would rub the insulation off it when the battery would slide forward causing a short circuit. The dealer routed the wires in back of the battery. Next, when I would pull into a parking space I began to notice that there was stream of oil on the ground . It didn't appear when I was driving so I thought it was someone else's car. When I went to check the oil level, I found I was almost 2 quarts low. Took it a dealer who told me that the rear end of the engine was worn away - that's where the 'rear seal' is or was actually. Thus the I had to have a new engine block installed, not with new pistons and crankshaft, etc, mind you. About a year later I took the car up to 60 on the turnpike and heard a banging noise. Dropped it back to 55 and it went away. Did that a few times to confirm it came from the engine. Back to the dealer. This time it was a bent cam shaft. It was fixed and that ended my experience with the diesel as the car traded as soon as I got it back.
Adam really enjoy your great videos. Grew up in this era reading the car and driver consumer reports magazines and collecting sales brochures for these now classic machines. Could you do a review of the late 70s/early 80s super small V8 engines? Olds 260, Chevy 267, Ford 255, and even Pontiac 265?
The 4.3 was actually a very good engine. it had 6 bolts per head and none of the other typical issues. they didn't make to much power but where great for the fwd cars.
Drag racing guys with olds cars like to use the olds 350 diesel blocks because they have forged cranks, and rods, and they had extra webbing in the main bearing area therefore they can handle high compression pistons and can withstand higher rpm’s. And can be bored to .125 over because the cylinder bores are much thicker than the gas version.. in stock diesel form they actually weren’t bad, but the red high sulfur diesel fuel of the day was not good for emissions
I bought a used Cierra diesel in ‘85: Drove the wheels off it! Only problem was replacing harmonic damper. Also owned a 6.2L diesel in a Suburban…that was a nightmare. Ate starters, batteries and injection pumps.
Interesting topic as I never knew about A-bodies with diesels. I imagine that those v6s were a bit heavy and would have lent those cars to having plenty of under-steer in emergency situations. Thank you for sharing Adam.
Some one was selling a Oldsmobile V8 Diesel engine on Facebook Marketplace. Not far from my place. Btw I live in Australia so it’s kinda odd to see one
Roosamaster fuel injection pump for the early Oldsmobile diesel engines were built in Stamford Connecticut, since you live in Pennsylvania talk to them.
It never made much sense that GM olds Gambled with the automotive diesels when they had a piece in Detroit diesel still . And not too many years later by the late 1990s Detroit diesel had came out with a clean sheet design DELTA 4.0 V6 diesel to do just what they had wanted but GM already was working on the Duramax with Isuzu.
My dad had (2) 1980 98 Oldsmobiles that had the diesel engine, and they were nothing but money pits. They were terrible. Loved the car, just not the engines. We also had an 83 Celebrity with a Diesel engine in it. We were driving through a parking lot one time and someone stopped us and asked us if anyone was hurt in the wreck, and we asked what wreck, and he said the one you are driving! 😂
Thank you for an informative video and sharing the wealth of knowledge. I had a feeling it was rushed to market and they were conducting research on the market. Had they got the Olds 350 diesel right just imagine the impact on the market now. I know diesels were or huge in other places like Europe. Diesel fuel is expensive today in 2022. Ford attempted diesels as we know with Lincolns from BMW. What could have been. Why were the truck diesels so much better? They use them to this day. Yes, you were right... GM lost ground during this time.
The heavy duty pick-up truck diesels were developed as diesels instead of converting from gasoline designs. RAM worked with Cummins and adopted their tried and true B5.9, Ford worked with International Harvester and adopted their 6.9 IDI V8 and GM worked with Detroit Diesel to develop the 6.2 NA V8. For light duty usage, Ford adopted the BMW 2.4L I-6 to test the market instead of investing in hundreds of millions $ to develop their own. Other light duty diesels from European and Japanese manufacturers have been adopted by the Detroit 3 in low volume applications over the years as more of a stop gap until one of their designs was ready, or the vehicle was redesigned.
I bought a new 83 Olds Cutlas Cierra with the 4.3 diesel and 3 sp. A/T. I thought it was a great engine: it was quiet going down the road and would get 38 MPG at 65. The torque converter would lock up in 2nd and 3rd which was nice on grades although it could have used a 4 sp. Never had any problems with eng. or trans. I wish I still had it. The offset crank throws made it even firing which was very nice.
I think the 4.3 Diesel by then got a bad rap as being the same bad engine as the V8 Diesel even though by the end of production run the bugs had been sorted out.
From 40 years in the future it’s seems strange our own government did the the foreign car companies such a giant favor with the cafe standards. Cars were pretty awful back then and the diesel fuel wasn’t the highly refined stuff we have today. It was nasty sooty stinky stuff ( but dirt cheap). If you’ve ever driven a gm car with a 700r4 or 4l60 and thought to yourself “wow! that first gear is low” it’s bc it was developed in this era. Cars were so gutless they couldn’t get off the line. My dad bought an Accord at that time. Oddly enough it was made in Ohio irrc.
Our neighbors had a 1980 all yellow Eldorado diesel - it belched stinky exhaust, you could hear the thing coming 2 blocks away and it had that greasy diesel smell just sitting there with the engine off. My thoughts are if GM used Detroit Diesel or Opel to design efficient diesel engines and allowed to perfect them before unleashing a PR nightmare they never recovered from, things might have been different.
@@DanEBoyd The only emissions on the diesels before 1980 was PVC, and only EGR till the end. Diesels don't use evaporative systems...diesel doesn't evaporate like gas.
I think too many people think it’s a simple task to adapt different engines to a vehicle. The reason the “gas” Olds 350 was converted is because of the rest of the peripherals of the vehicles. A change to a Detroit Diesel or an Opel engine would mean a change to the transmission and transmission mounts, possibly the shifter, engine mounts, water pump and other belt driven accessories, on down the line. That would be a far greater cost for all of the vehicles involved, and a lot more R&D time.I’m not trying to admonish GM for past mistakes, but please don’t think that an entirely different line of engines would have been an easy or cost effective solution.
Worked at and eventually purchased an East Cleveland suburban diesel repair shop. All these models were our specialty, as the owner and most of the technicians had formal college training in diesel power plants. I always thought the A body vehicles were far superior to their big brothers. But those cold 🥶 Cleveland winters were tough for these cars. Like a few others here, we made a ton of money servicing what the dealers had no clue about.
I wonder why Ford and GM didn’t look to their Euro/U.K. divisions for help. We already had proven engines that could easily meet the CAFE standards. It seems daft to try and go from making lazy V8’s to efficient 4 cylinders and diesels from scratch, when they could have had them on tap 🤔
well i happen to own a buick century with the 4.3l diesel ,,it stood on this farm when i purchased it , it is a spare parts car as the seats ect are really bad ,quite a bit of rust but i couldent just scrap it since there are good parts on it..problem is NOBODY else own one like that here in Denmark,,i will try to take a pick and post a link tomorrow
I just purchased a 1984 Cutlass Ciera brougham it is a one owner with close to 300k miles has been sitting for about 10 years but ran when parked. I think I am going to make a video series revive and drive home, then possible restore it. If the uni-body is too far gone and it probably is I will pull the engine rebuild it and add a turbo and put it in a 4x4 s10 or ranger for my daughter.
Note: the fwd 4.3 block and red block had different bell housings.....and different intake manifolds...... I was the diesel tech back in the day for an Olds/GMC dealership.
My uncle had the 1979 Cutlass diesel 261 and it ran fine for years. I often drove it. He had added a more complex water separating system added at day one of owning this car as you mentioned water in truck diesel was a major destroyer of this engine. The second thing was the need to change oil on very short intervals. You did not need to use very exotic oil, just a good detergent oil. He changed the oil every 1,500 miles and never more than 2,000. It lasted years without any issue and he sold it in 1983. I drove it and got 30 mpg. My V-6 powered 1979 GM full size was sluggish and slow compared to this car which had good throttle response and was faster than a 6 cylinder car of the day. Yes compared to the last GM diesel this one had lots of issues but they could be minimized if you were in the know about the damage water in the fuel did to the injectors and you were really into maintenance.
I ordered a Cutlass in 1983 with the 4.3L V6 and drove the car for about 20 years, by the time I sent it to the junkyard the car had about 275,000 miles. It weighed 3,400 lbs, so was not the fastest, but once up to highway speed it ran fine at 30 mpg+ with the highest being 36. In the lighter Cierra it was higher mpg. I did add a good water separator to it. My brother had an 82 Cierra 4.3L he drove for years. I currently have an 84 Cierra diesel that came from Arizona so the body is solid. Another thing under development was the Tuned Induction V6 diesel. Tests reported 0-60 in Ten Seconds and quarter mile of 17.5 seconds which is faster then stock 4.3's. They reported 101 hp vs the stock 85 hp.
Adam works for Alexa, he is Artificial intelligence.
Quoted for truth.
Yeah not too sure that 10 seconds in that Cierra diesel, maybe if you threw it over a cliff at the grand canyon it could drop that fast. Speaking of fast, ever do a Mercedes 220 D automatic with air conditioning and 4 adults , yeah now thats like 10 days 0 to 59.5 mph Did not think it got to 60 mph, The later 240D automatic was equally scary, Ralph Nader could have done a "unsafe because it never gets any speed" They say speed kills, well no speed and a highway short entrance is killer in one, just saying
Hey Adam, it's nice that you picked this very nice tranquil setting to talk about the notorious Oldsmobile diesel engine that has such a horrible reputation!!! Thanks for sharing this informative video!!! 👍👍🙂
I still have three of these cars. Only one still runs. My nephew still drives the 82 Buick Century. It gets 32-36mpg and is extremely comfortable to ride in. The 4.3L V6 is not the worst diesel ever made; it just inherited its big brother's reputation. The V6 was a well built engine. All the problems of its big brother (350 olds diesel) had been fixed by the time it went into production--Good fuel filters, 4 bolt mains, 16 head bolts on a V6 instead the 10 on the V8, heavier block. One of the cars I have has 375,000 miles it and it never had anything done to it other than basic fuilds and filter changes. If the injectors had been replaced at least once in that time, it probably would still be going strong. The heads melted because of VERY wornout injectors. The biggest reason these didn't have morepower than they did is because the EGR valve was right in the middle of the intake and it only had less than an inch clearence all the way around it and they were governor limited to 3100rpm. I removed the EGR on the 82 and cut out the mount, and it was a big improvement in power. The biggest problem with these engines now is parts availiabilty. These would have been an amazing engine with a turbo.
The Detroit automobile diesel engines of the '80s were a godsend to the Japanese manufacturers.
Every vehicle i owned in the 80's was Japanese. The quality difference between domestic and Japanese was simply astounding.
every one created at least 1 lifetime Toyota buyer
German too...my Dad went from a 81 Eldorado with the 5.7L diesel to a 300D. Owned several Mercedes since and zero Cadillacs.
Yes you're right and still to this day have never fully recovered
The 300d is truly a gem
I know someone who had an 82 celebrity with a well worn iron duke , another friend had a 84 with a diesel, they sounded the same at idle.
Hilarious because it's true.
@@greggc8088 heard an old gm beater a few weeks back idle into the gas station, everyone looking.
Tbh, it took me a second of listening to tell if it was an iron duke or a diesel.
Nope,iron duke😆
In 1980 I bought a VW Dasher wagon diesel and a buddy of mine bought an Olds Cutlass diesel wagon. I got nothing but bashing on how slow small and everything else compared to his Olds diesel , I drove his Olds several times and began to wonder if I didn't make the right choice on a diesel wagon over the Olds. This bashing went on for a couple years till one morning his wife took out of their drive way up a fairly steep hill and the Olds pitched a rod through the side of the block at 60,000 mi. My VW went on to surpass 200K miles and I received no more VW bashing out of my friend after the big explosion. Also by then the reputation was so bad he didn't even bother to put a new engine in the car to fix it. It went to the junk yard.
The VW diesels of that era were no prize, either. My family had an '80 Dasher Diesel. It tossed a rod through the side of the block at 80K miles. It was the nicest looking car in the junkyard.
@@alantrimble2881 the 1.5 till 1980 wasnt that great of an engine ,the westys with that 1.6 from 81 up was alot better.
You gotta rev em some , the 1.5 even more.
I remember thousands of times when dad was driving mom's 81 rabbit ,he drove it like he stole it and it loved it.
Approach a hill in 4th gear, and when the speed drops to the redline of 3rd on the speedo ,drop it in 3rd and let it sit at redline for however long the hill is.
It could be 5-6mi long, let it eat.
That car went over 200k before i put another 40 on it.
You could brick the gas and it'll sit there all day at 5400 and do nothing.
I used to scare my friends by bricking the gas for 5 mins at a shot in neutral just to see em trip out.
Yeah ,it's governed, but 5400 isnt exactly slow.
My father owned an 81 rabbit diesel... I always had a very similar experience when driving his . downshifting from 5
Sad I. Ultimately took one down to the bones and used modern diesel upgrades! I solved alot of the issues they suffered from. Have had no issues reaching 188,947 miles on it cranks first time never had and failures. I drive hwy mostly and some city
@@alantrimble2881VW Diesels in the 80’s weren’t very good - forty-ish horsepower with a timing belt and a weak head gasket. At that time, Mercedes was king of Passenger car Diesels, with MFI Peugeot as a close second.
People make fun of GM for trying to turn a gas engine into a diesel. However the fact is that most companies that make both gas and diesel engines will try to reuse as many parts between them as possible. Also I read somewhere that GM thought they had a new process that would have made the engine strong enough w/o adding more head bolts, but in practice it didn't work the way they thought it would. I think in reality the olds diesels were just another example of 80's GM forcing their customers to beta test their products.
It's better to do it the other way ,like Cummins.
A C series cones to mind.
They convert em to gassers by swapping pistons and heads basically.
It's best to start with a diesel to make a decent gasser,not the other way around.
And even then, they took a perfectly good diesel engine and ruined it with spark plugs🤦
Haha I'm not a big fan of em , because it's not a diesel but they work great.
That wasn’t this engine
I made a mound of money repairing the diesel injection pumps on 5.7 and 4.3 O’diesels. In late 70s through 84 when there were lots of them on the road and GM covered the pumps. I worked at a Chev and then Buick dealer. The diesel pump shop charged too much so the GM brands in the town sent them to me. My service manager and the IRS loved me those years. The elastomer damper ring that took shock out of the drive to governor weight cage would harden and fragment and then the bits plugged up ports and they quit. I did loads of engine repairs too but that was not as lucrative as injection pumps removed, fixed, and installed in a little over 1 1/2 hours for a little over 4 hours pay.
Ah yeah ,I still came across some of those in the late 90s.
The engine shop (which was full in house EVERYTHING) I worked at used to do a fair amount of big 3 diesel pickup repairs.
Ol stanadyne pumps weren't too bad except that ring.
While working there I got enough guts to repair a Bosch ve of mine.
After that ,it was all downhill on my VW turbodiesels ,tweaking em to the moon for a 25-30% increase in power 😁
@@MrTheHillfolk oh VW.... a perfect car.... TOTALLY F-ED because of 1 stupid thing
only motor ive ever blown up was in a VW.....was a touregg (or whatever)
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it has an oil TEMP!!! guage..... in a "soccer mom" SUV.......... but ONLY an "idiot light" for oil PRESSURE!!!
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my family has health issues (diabetes.... my dad and sister.... but it "skipped" me..... at least so far)
so we would always have to drive 320 miles to billings montana (as my town of 2300, while "large" for MT.... doesnt have the specalist Drs)
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ANYWAY..... to make some money..... we would drive cars back from the auction house..... for a used car lot owner we were friends with
but this VW was at the used car lots "mechanic's" house....
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we get their and i pop the hood and start checking fluids
"oh, dont worry.... ive checked it all"
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"then why is it a quart low on oil....... and the coolant overflow bottle seems to have oil/water mix around it??"
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"oh, thats probably from the pressure wash..... ill get you a quart of oil"
*brings me a quart of some blue "compression in a can"...... that poured like water*
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"uh..... ok.... i asked for oil....... if everything is OK, why does it need this??"
"i dont have any 5w-30.........." (what mechanic doesnt have 5w-30???)
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so he dumps it in....... and we take off
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about 20 miles from his house..... i start to hear the lifters ticking
so a pop it into neutral (removing load and RPM from the engine......and trying to listen to make sure im hearing correctly)
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the SECOND it shifts into neutral...... KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
then.... AFTER 10 SECONDS OF IT KNOCKING!!!...... ONLY THEN!!!!.... did the low oil PSI light come on
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but the oil temp was perfectly fine..... thanks VW
you stupid fucks
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the oil pump "drive shaft" runs through a coolant passage.....
you have ~40 PSI oil..... and ~15 psi coolant
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so when the seal fails..... 40 PSI - 15 = oil in your coolant
(which is why i saw the "sludge" by the coolant recovery tank)
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i should have known better...... but dude is a "mechanic"...... and im not familiar with VW engines
however.... i NEVER believed it was from the pressure washer...... ESPECIALLY when he brought me that "compression in a can" BS
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i just expected a pretty good oil leak..... not a seal TOTALLY failing, blowing every last drop into the cooling system in about 3 seconds....
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if you can tell me why..... in a SOCCER MOM SUV!!!!....... why oil temp is MORE important than oil PSI
i will go buy a VW right now...... take out a loan with my 322 credit score and everything
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its an SUV with a v8.....
cool..... but not a FUCKING RACE CAR!!! (and race cars have BOTH!! temp and PSI!!!)
I was a tech at the only GM dealership in Canada that sold all GM models: Chev, Pontiac, Olds, Buick, Cadillac, Corvette, LD trucks, MD trucks, HD trucks. Eventuelly ran our HD truck garage and we worked on all these powerplants. We found that the blocks themselves didnt have the strength to withstand the compression pressures and we suffered with these diesel powerplants until the 6.2/6.5 which were true diesel blocks, with apprpriate lower block strength. Great channel, thanks for your on-going effort.
The early 6.2L diesel would push the crankshaft right out of the bottom of the block. They were hot garbage.
Except for the undersized starter bolts, and not enuff meat to drill and rethread one size larger, and the oft discarded little front starter triangulation bracket
@@CORVAIRWILDthat helper bracket for the starter was there for a reason!
My older friend Stan, who was an engineer back in the late 1970's said "if there is a cheaper way to do GM will find it." This was not a compliment.
My parents had three diesel cars back in the late 70's/early 80's. A 1977 Peugeot 504 sedan, a 1979 Olds Delta 88 sedan (3.5L V-8 - first generation diesel), and a 1981 Olds Cutlass Supreme Couple (5.7L V-8 - second generation diesel). The engine in the Delta 88 blew up with 48,000 miles on it. GM split the cost on the replacement engine. That engine lasted until the mother of our neighbor, who bought the car from us, killed the engine (either running it without coolant or oil - I don't recall which). The 1981 Cutlass had the better engine, but the tranny went and the Lee Miles shop replaced it with the infamous Turbo200 tranny (more on this later). The other problem with the 1981 was that if the car sat between 2-4 hours it would not restart. The computer thought the engine was warm enough to start without the glow plugs, but it wasn't. After 4 hours the glow plugs came on and the car started up again. In 1986 Dad had a mechanic replace the diesel with a used Olds 350 V-8 gas engine, with a four barrel carburetor. That's when we found out about the tranny scam.
The best things about the GM diesels were: 1; The noise. People hanging out in the street gave way when they heard the diesel coming. No need for the horn. 2; After a few years the injectors in the replacement diesel in the 1979 Delta 88 needed replacement themselves. As a result the car smoked heavily when the pedal was floored. On day a person was riding my bumper as we passed some police activity. Once safely past I floored it, resulting in a black cloud of soot erupting in the face of the tailgater. When the cloud cleared he was nowhere to be seen. I wonder if the soot stalled his engine?
If a good part costs 2 cents more than a crap one. Use the crap one.
@@mpetersen6 This is how Mercedes-Benz did it at least in the 90th when Mr. Schrempp has been in charge.
Chevrolet Vega...
I ordered a 72 wagon in the fall of 71. At 9000 miles it was burning a quart of oil every 450 miles and the Chevrolet dealer told me that was normal. I was 26 yo, not knowing how to complain further. I owned the car for 27 years. At about 120,000 miles it was on it's third engine. Everything else of the car was wonderful. Great handling with it's wide oval tires and (ordered) lsd rear end. No electrical issues, never changed the oil on it's Opel four speed manual. 80,000 miles on a set of Michelins due to great alignment.
I thought Vegas used the 4 speed Saginaw?
I've been in sheer ecstasy with all the Oldsmobiles diesel talk on your channel lately Adam....
Great content....good or bad, people need to know the history of Olds Diesels.....
I am driving an 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera Brougham Holiday with a 4.3L V6 diesel. It has aluminum heads on it, get 38 mpg(Hwy 75mph) has very good pick up for a naturally aspirated diesel. I also have a 1981 Riviera with the 350 5.7L V8 diesel and I had a 1982 Oldsmobile Toronado 5.7L diesel that had 484,000 miles on it when it got rid of it. I never had any head gasket issues, I changed the oil every 3000 miles religiously used only Kendal D3 30, when Amoco was around their Premier Diesel fuel, changed a lot of water pumps, couple radiators, A/C compressors and a few starters and that was it. But I also knew I wasn’t driving a Corvette, I drove it like a diesel, let it warm up a couple minutes on first start up, if I got off the highway after a long drive I’d let it idle a couple minutes before shutting it off. It’s like driving your couch down the street! There was a lot of blame to go around, GM had to know an engine with a 22.5:1 compression ratio and pistons that decked out had to be clamped tightly conversely customers (not all but many) didn’t really read up on their new Diesel engine, they would use dry gas(anhydrous alcohol) when they got water in their fuel, next thing they knew their IP failed, all the gaskets had broken apart from the dry gas. They weren’t putting the correct oil in the engines, they required SF/CC or SF/CD rated oil, and they’d use regular “gas” engine rated oil, crank bearing would go, cams would wear , cylinders were scored, or they would use a weight not recommended in the winter and the engine didn’t get the correct lubrication.
However, if you took care of them, drove it as a diesel, you could get a reliable car out of the “DX” blocks, and ARP made a stud kit that fixed the weak head bolt design, the “D” blocks with non roller lifters, pencil injectors, return lines(that always seemed to leak) were always problematic.
It is pretty funny the stares I get, or that ever popular statement I seemed to get, “you better put some oil in it before your engine seizes” um no it’s a diesel, “no it’s not” “a GM”, yeah and well Oldsmobile seems to think it is!
I’d post a picture but I guess it won’t let you
If GM was smart, they would’ve worked on improving Isuzu Turbo Diesels (what they ultimately sort of did with the DuraMax) but in terms of optimizing them for larger, heavier American passenger cars. Either that, or license the OM617 Turbo from Mercedes, or one of the MFI Peugeot Turbo Diesels.
Thank you Adam, what memories resurface from my 15 years watching your video, it reminds me of my father's purchase of the brand new 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 diesel 5.7L, newly built in Michigan and delivered to Baie-Comeau Qc. Seeing the discussions on the internet, I see that the reliability issues were different for us, a fuel water detector was installed by the dealer, a fuel injection pump bleed done by a Detroit Diesel engine tech, and the preventive maintenance according to the owner's manual was always done. Our Oldsmobile was very reliable for the first 5 years, my parents drove smoothly and were careful with their car. But after a 400 mile drive home on Christmas Day 1984, a few miles from home, a "boom" was heard in the engine, and the engine noise became louder. The next morning at home in -20C (-4F), that was the end of it, a bearing cap mount broke as well as the crankshaft. A new engine was installed at the expense of GM Canada, knowing the reliability of the 5.7L :)
Unfortunately the ‘78 & ‘79 they hadn’t made the bolts longer in the “D” blocks and sometimes it would tear the crank right out of the engine, by 1980 they had corrected that issue.
I had to read all the comments posted thus far before making my own.
I bought a 1982 Regal with the 4.3 litre diesel back in 1991. The car had 73,000 miles on it. It needed an injection pump rebuild. The car itself was immaculate. So I got the injection pump rebuilt and the car ran great! ...for a while. The car slowly started losing power and I soon found myself having to add transmission fluid to the fuel to give it enough power to get out of its own way. Replacement engine parts soon became obsolete and I was having to improvise and was changing starter motors every 15,000 miles or so. Bosch made an aftermarket starter that would have costed $260 to purchase, which would've been insane at the time. The highlight of the car and engine was that at one time I had the car up to approximately 120 MPH on a lonely stretch of highway and the car sailed along like a dream! Eventually the starter went out and at 132,000 miles I pulled the engine. It's interesting though that the car has a 2.56 end gear ratio to accommodate the amount of torque and still give it the mileage it got. I have a 3.8 gasoline engine that I still have yet to put in the car, but to compensate the taller gears am adding a 4 barrel carburetor and manifold. It's been an interesting learning experience. The Regal is a beautiful car, and I wouldn't have it had it not been that it came with the diesel engine.
I'm going to be a jerk. The Regal came with the 5.7 liter V8 diesel, not the 4.3 liter V6 diesel.
@@douglasb.1203 they had both. The 4.3 was very rare as they only put about a thousand of them in the G body rear wheel drive cars, and I happen to have one of them.
Why do you need to add a 4 bbl. to 'compesate' for 2.56 gears?
@@mikehasemann9270 since the typical end gear ratio is 3.23:1 for a 3.8 litre V6, I'm compensating the engine with a little more intake. It's almost like being in overdrive when I hit third gear, and the quadrajet will give it a little more for startoffs.
I never heard anything bad about the V6 diesel in the front drive cars. The few I saw back then actually sounded and ran better than the 5.7 on its best day.
I bought a used 1978 Cutlass diesel from a co-worker for like $250 about 25 years ago. I got it cheap because it had two head bolts that broke at the cap. It was the 350 ci. I replaced the head gasket and the head bolts and the two batteries and drove it for a few months back and forth to work. Sometimes at a stop, the engine would just die and would not crank over. Waiting a few minutes, it would crank back up like nothing happened. I finally gave in after a starter bolt broke off in the threads. I sold it for what I paid for it to a teenage neighbor. The neighbor was fully aware of the repair history.
We were raising 6 kids and not much money so I bought many nice GM cars with all kinds of the diesels for not much money. Mostly cheap fixes- injector pumps , rocker arms , head gaskets we drove em til they died and then found another - Cadillacs , Buicks and olds mostly
In the mid-late 70's I was an HD truck technician for a beer & wine distributor. We ran both gasoline and diesel powered delivery and over the road trucks. The owner was very politically involved and we had just gone through a gasoline crisis. We had our own 10,000 gallon regular gasoline and diesel fuel tanks on site and he was bound and determined not to have to worry about purchasing unleaded gasoline for his own vehicles so.............Cadillac Sedan deVille with the Old 5.7L Diesel.
He showed up at the shop grinning ear to ear with his diesel powered Cadillac and had me fill the tank. I told him his wife wasn't going to like the exhaust fumes when he started the car in the garage. Within a few days he gave the the diesel Caddy to his sales manager as his new company car. The word was that his wife wouldn't let him park it in the garage........
Thank you for a bit of history and perspective on this engine, Adam. Before this, i'd hardly heard of the 4.3L V-6 or V-8 diesel engines.
The depth and breadth of your knowledge and understanding is quite awesome.
We had an '81 Buick Regal with the 350 diesel. In the five years we owned it we replaced the transmission 3 times and the engine once. When the heads went on the second engine my folks said goodbye to GM forever and switched to Fords. The Buick was very comfortable and got great mileage on the then cheaper diesel fuel, but it certainly wasn't durable. It also had a mix of both SAE and metric bolts on engine accessories, making it fun to replace belts. About 10 years after trading it in, I saw it one day driving around in the Central Valley of California, pretty far from our home, so it was quite the coincidence. Whoever owned it had bought a crate 350 and converted it to gas.
Diesel cheaper then. Imagine running one of these today withe Diesel at $6. Probably cost slightly less than all the Cummies & Powerstrokes. Dumb consumers.
And now finally it's actually reliable
ford was WAY worse for using SAE and metric bolts....
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and how did your folks like having to pay 100 dollars a spark plug on the 5.4???
My friend has one (a 350) in an 82 Toronado. Still running somehow with over 500,000 miles on it. It does have ARP head studs but besides that and roller tip rockers the rest of the engine is completely stock. Still gets 40 mpg on the highway and runs on whatever waste oil is thrown in the tank. It especially likes 0w-20 as fuel. Of course not as engine oil, it only takes straight 50 or 20w-50. But still runs like a top doing 100+ miles a week.
@@theodorgiosan2570I would love to have a diesel Toronado/Riviera/ Eldorado ❤
My Grandfather was a Ford guy his whole life, but he strayed once when he bought a new 1980 Cutlass 5.7L diesel wagon, complete with the woodgrain exterior. He was keen on the diesel fuel economy, and as a teen I thought it was a pretty nice car. But, he had to have the head gaskets done under warranty, and several other repairs as well. He gave up on the diesel Cutlass after only two years and went back to Ford, buying an LTD Country Squire wagon.
His comment at the time was "GM sure got egg on their face with that diesel".
That sucks, in 81, The 350 diesel became better. 78 to 80 was the problem years that gave the bad reputation.
Enjoy the video but small correction; A diesel engine compresses only the air. Not Aaron fuel like a gasoline engine. Fuel is injected once compression is complete. Or at least almost complete
I was about to point this out and decided to look to see if someone else beat me to it. It's the hot intake air charge (from being compressed) that ignites the injected fuel in a diesel.
Yes. 22-1. Back in the Day; however modern diesels now have compression ratios that are much lower. Usually below 16-1. At the same time gasoline direct injected engines are raising their ratios, normally over 13-1. Not that much of a difference anymore
@@kevinbarry71 Couple of comments: One of the reasons the Olds diesel had an exceptionally high compression ratio was because it used a Recardo pre-chamber design. Virtually all modern diesels are turbo-charged and are not pre-chamber designs, hence the reduced compression ratios. Turbo-charged gas engines typically have lower compression ratios than their naturally aspirated counterparts.
@@Gary7even not exactly, back then that was standard compression ratio. And a turbo charger wouldn't lower it much if at all. The reason the ratios were so high was because the injector pump produced very low pressure compared to today's versions and the injectors were primitive. These days the fuel is under so much more pressure atomizes much much better and thus ignites easier and burns much cleaner
Well, sir, I understand about engineering headcount (I have worked for NASA, Cessna, JPL etc. (I am a researcher)) but most of GM's problems were their own. If they had elected to start work on obvious upgrades that were needed instead of relying on banks of lawyers and huge political contributions to avoid having to change they would not have had the problems and our country would have been a lot healthier and wealthier. It's also too bad a good little engine got caught in the backlash, obviously is they had got it out first instead of doing a backyard level conversion to the V8 things would have worked very differently. I have considerable respect for GM engineers and I suspect that GM management had no real desire for this to work out, they knew that if the cars they made were just terrible then congress would be able to use that as an excuse to write different laws for them versus other countries, which the Congress did. It is only now 30+ years later that American cars have begun to recover from what Detroit management did. At that Tesla's success is not because of lazy American workers or unions or etc, it is simply that Detroit lost the ability to plan ahead or even realize which way the wind was blowing and did it to the nation again (thankfully someone outside their management 'training' system was around to help the move to the EV's)
It is a measure of GM’e managerial incompetence that it could have some of the world’s best engineers, and still fail to deliver quality engines for around 20 years!!
This was the Roger Smith era, from what I have read, he was one of the worst CEOs GM ever had.
3.5 eco boost carbon on intake valves due to DI
5.7 hemi.... changed lifter angle... leading to no lube to cam till ~1500 rpm is reached (same design flaw on all 5 generations of the 5.7/6. hemi)
6.0 and 6.4 power stroke..... need i say more?
VW v8.... oil pump "drive shaft" runs through a coolant passage..... leading to ALL the oil being pumped into the coolant in about 3 seconds when the seal fails (and it WILL fail)
VW also has an oil temp gauge.... on their soccer mom SUV......... but no oil PSI gauge
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and the 5.4 spark plug SAGA!!!
first it was too many threads...... and, typical ford, trying to re-invent things that worked for ~100 years..... like the spark plug
then it was too FEW threads and they would blow out.... but AT LEAST it was a normal spark plug (proving the 5.4 didnt need re-invented spark plugs to work... or pass emissions)
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like.... their isnt a DAMN THING wrong with GMs v8s
from 1955 to 2022
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AFM sure..... but a simple OBD "dongle" fixes that
@@kainhall I have heard that all DI engines carbon up their valves, not just Ecoboost. As to GM v-8s, there have been issues with valves failing in recent years. Older(pre-2000) GM and Ford V-8s were ok(except the GM diesel-I have had friends with these horrible things) I have driven 2 Ford Rangers many miles, over 170,000(totaled by rear end collision) and 250,000. These had the 2.3 four cylinder and the 3.0 V-6. No real issues. My wife had a Ford Escort that went 240,000, but it had a Mazda engine. I have heard about the other Ford engine issues you mention, but never owned these.
I had a relative who owned a 1985 Oldsmobile 98 Regency Brougham Coupe with the ultra rare 4.3 liter Diesel. He was fairly wealthy so he only kept the car for about 3 years before trading it back into the Oldsmobile dealer on a Touring sedan. But.. I did get to ride in the car several times before he sold it and it ran beautifully. I was a young teen at the time but i knew these diesels were fairly rare even back then, especially in the new C body cars. As i know, he never had any issues with it's durability during his 3 years of ownership.
I owned a 1980 Cutlass 5.7L diesel. This engine was replaced with a Goodwrench 5.7L diesel before I bought the car. This diesel never once left me stranded. It always started and ran well. Not the fastest but for $500 bucks I didn't complain. The lockup torque converter had a dimmer switch hooked up to it so the lockup mode was manually controlled. I could actually stall the diesel coming to a stop without unlocking the converter. Aside from being somewhat slow on acceleration the 5.7 diesel was a decent engine in my experience.
If it works it works.
I still want to see this and the V8 Olds Diesel tuned, turbo'd and run on a dyno. ARP studs and modern MLS gaskets should contain the pressure!
Never saw a 4.3 diesel. BUT I did work on an 82 Buick Regal that originally did have 1 in it. The owner swapped a 4.1L Buick 4bbl and 200r4 trans into it at some point. He really did a great job ( or somebody did). Correct engine and computer harness as well as updated ECM and PROM. Because it was still registered as a diesel, he never had to go for emissions.
Had a good buddy who cherished his Century 4.3. He 4-speed swapped it, totally redid the engine, even so far as running Harland Sharp roller rockers. Aftermarket fuel filtration kept it alive.
It ran pretty good for what it was. Till it lost an oil cooler and shelled the crank.
Four speed auto or manual?
@@michaelchan8915 Manual
@@typrus6377 I would have to see it to believe it. I could understand a Pontiac 6000STE which came available from factory with a manual if I'm not mistaken. But a Buick Century? Was it originally equipped with a floor shifter or column shifter? Which transmission did he use, to bolt it up to? I know these are some in depth questions, but I'm having trouble picturing it. My mom had an '84 Buick Century with the 2.8L V6 and three speed auto so I remember how these cars look very well.
@@michaelchan8915 He took the Muncie out of a 6000 or a Celebrity. I remember he had to do something interesting with the pedal group and tunnel to mount the shifter. He also had to have the flywheel custom machined to fit the engine, and turned down the ring gear mounting.
@@michaelchan8915 ruclips.net/video/qpA_vV9Vdso/видео.html
What killed the Oldsmobile diesel engines was the bean counter involvement. The first thing they did was remove the water fuel separator from the equation. Talk about stupid. I have seen a 5.7 Oldsmobile diesel in a pickup that had a John Deere fuel filtration system retrofitted to it with stronger head bolts installed. It gave up the ghost at 486,000+ miles. Most stock 5.7s were lucky to make it past 100,000 miles without a catastrophic failure.
I have a British friend at work, who asked me why diesel engines haven't caught on in Canada/USA, for cars. I said "Oldsmobile diesel", and explained what a lemon it was. It poisoned the perception of diesel in North America for decades.
You make a good point, Adam, in this and other videos. I complain about malaise era North American cars, but as you point out, they were under the gun with fuel economy standards, and were asked to do an awful lot in a short time. That could not have been easy.
@Highly Polished Turd
Mercedes made a landmark reputation with the its diesels from the 1980's
Its because of the US having stricter clean air laws, paticularly with nitrous oxides. The eu pushed diesel forever and now theyre paying for it with smog.
@@turnne Mercedes were much better but not as good as the Japanese. I remember my uncle who lived in San Diego. After driving lower end cars for his whole life decided to get a Cadillac, a diesel (early 80's). It had so many problems the dealer allowed him a great trade on another Cadillac. This one was also unreliable, so he sold it at a loss and purchased a Mercedes diesel. While this was much better, it too started to give him problems. When it was a couple of years old he traded it in on a Lexus LS 400 (at introduction in 1989). Once he bought that he was a Lexus customer for life.
@@cgmoog Well the Japanese didnt have luxury cars at the time. That was more late 80 and early 90's with Acura and Lexus that had come to market
Mercedes had the M617 diesel engine in the early 80's and it was legendary with reliability
It’s funny you said “lemons”, but the Olds 5.7L diesel is responsible for the “Lemon Law” that we have today, because of that engine this law was born!
Drove one as a young man, couldn’t pull the socks off your feet.
I've never owned the 4.3 V6 diesel nor have I ever actually seen one in person but I've often heard that they really were not that terrible because when they finally came available the engineers had solved most of the issues the early 5.7's had. I've owned 3 of the v8 olds diesels, 2 5.7 both the "DX" iteration and 1 4.3 v8, both 5.7 engines were pretty good and mostly trouble free but the 4.3 was in an 82 cutlass supreme and quickly got replaced with a Buick 430 I had on hand because it could not get out of it's own way! One of the 5.7 engines was in an 81 custom cruiser and even had an aftermarket turbocharger on it... It was a great car and it got used for a whole lot of camping trips! Wish I hadn't sold it or could find another one like it. The other one I owned was in an 84 Delta 88 and I got to drive that car for a whole week before some numbskull stole it and it was never seen again.
Somebody STOLE your GM 5.7 Diesel Delta 88? WOW! I never heard of such a thing, most people couldn't even give them away for free!
(just to clarify, I too had a 5.7, as I once owned a 1980 Bonneville Wagon. Loved that car! This was before "rolling coal" was a thing, but it was sure fun to do when anyone tailgated you. Drop it into 2nd and have a good laugh! It went about 125K then the engine just started unraveling at a red light, while I was waiting to make a left turn)
@@johndaniels651 Not long after it was stolen there was a guy with a tow truck that was arrested because he was stealing cars by towing them away and scrapping them. I'm pretty sure that's where it went, either that or someone who just didn't know any better took it. It definitely takes a special type of person to want to own an olds diesel.
I drove a Cutlass Ciera with 4.3L diesel at the GM Proving Ground. It drove nice and was actually a little quicker than a similar car with the 2.5L Iron Duke. There were actually plans put the 4.3L diesel into the 1985 M van (Astro/Safari), but that combination was axed before it went into production.
Any chance I could ask you a few questions about you driving the 4.3 at the prooving grounds? I'm an oldsmobile diesel history buff and trying to always collect now info when I can find it!
@@HeinH-dx1gu Sure! (That was 40 years ago however, so my memory might be slight!)
I drive two Oldsmobile diesel for daily drivers
I believe having the injection timing badly off can produce extreme forces and pressures in a Diesel engine that can quickly destroy even a decent design Diesel engine such as were used in commercial vehicles
Pretty sure he means the 4.3 V8. The 4.3 V6 is pretty well made.
I have had several. The Celebrity was the lightest car with the 4.3 and almost got 40 mpg.
Yes. Each division made it's own V8 350.
This led , SOMEHOW, to the big recall in late 76 of a large number of mostly Buicks which wound-up with Chevrolet 350s.
My aunt bought a new Century Regal in 76 and in a few months recieved her notice. It was late in 76 so the 77s were on the lots and she took the car back and the dealer traded her straight across for a new 77 Regal.
In the 80's these cars were a bargain and most were really clean ! we used to pull the diesels out for the iron and hot rod them out with small block chevy 350 combos and some 454's alot of my builds are still.racing to this day !
Remember when an economy car was a Chevelle with a 250 ?
I bought in 1983 a Chevelle SS 396 4 speed Muncie with a pristine green with the white racing stripe for a $1000, yes 1972 definitely brought an end to a great time of American automobiles and if you're not American you'll never understand
@@hynestimothy411 Nice. My neighbor here says he bought a '67 Chevelle SS new, and sold it in '74 for $1500. He said it had maybe 45,000 miles on it. It was just a used car back then.
For the most part,1972 was the last year for GM greatness with a few rare exceptions
This 4.3L diesel V6 was actually reliably much better than its parent the 5.7L diesel V8, not least since the 4.3L had more head bolts per cylinder plus all the other remedies the 5.7L diesel had since the 1981 model year.
True
In 1988 someone traded in a 85 Ciera Brogham 4.3 diesel with a "rod knock". I bought the car for a very cheap price and it turned out to be a drippy injector causing the knock! It got great mileage after that and was a decent car. As far as the 4.3 V8 diesel it was an absolute slug! A one year only engine and I'll bet very few survive.
My neighbors bought a brand new Ciera diesel in the mid '80s. Noisy and gutless. It shook so much at idle that the instrument pamel was literally falling out if it! The owners got their money's worth out if it, though. They kept it for at least 10 years and nearly 150k miles. They drove it with a blown head gasket for their last 2 years of ownership, then sold it for scrap.
In my opinion, Olds gas engines prior to '77 had a distinct sound. A Delta 88 did not sound like an Impala. I was in high school when several of my friends parents purchased the Olds diesel. Unfortunately for most, it caused them to abandon the brand once they got rid of the car.
The biggest casualty is Oldsmobile itself
It's like you say Adam, GM used the customers for R&D. They must have known that the original 4 head bolt design was never going to work out, along with a lack of water separator. I'm sure engineers reported these issues with these original designs. Did upper management just not want to hear these warnings in favor of getting this stuff "to market" and saving money? I still can't understand why the powerful car industry did not have enough political pull to soften the CAFE regulations to give them more time for R&D so that the initial products would be more reliable/robust. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the customers lost to these initial disasters would never come back to GM, no matter how good the products might be, and you can not blame them. I would certainly behave the same way, cars a major expense. Why gamble on an "improved GM product" when there were so many good/great foreign alternatives. Don't get me wrong, some sort of "CAFE" mandate was needed for the good of the earth, but the playing field was surely stacked against the domestic automakers. Upper managements' decisions to rush untested engines with known issues to market, surely helped kill GM I only wish that OMC, the company I worked for (Evinrude/Johnson) would have taken the time to learn from all the automakers errors. Our initial
"smog outboards" were the same thing, untested with known issues. These disasters killed our dealer network and loyal customer base.
These blunders break my heart for sure. All these horrible "mistakes" not only led to the downfall of the US automakers, but to killing our economy and the loss of decent jobs for so many
Management thought(probably somewhat correctly) that customers couldn't handle the specific maintenance a diesel requires. The solution was just to eliminate the water separator. Diesel was notoriously dirty back then and the water ruined the injector pumps and caused hydro lock pushing the heads off the block(stripping head bolts, blowing gaskets).
@@metrawatt OK, well I understand that concern. Diesels are surely not for everybody, but they do require some very specific maintenance. So, management's answer was to just eliminate the filter? That doesn't make any sense. Trying to educate/screen potential buyers before the purchase would have been a better decision, steering folks back to gas engines that did not want to make the commitment to diesel service procedures.
@@donk499 a very short sighted response for sure
@@metrawatt I guess I just don't understand....
I was working as a mechanic at the Ford dealer during this time and we were learning to work on the International 6.9 which was relatively new. Before anyone says the IH 6.9 was better than the Olds 5.7 diesel; no, the 6.9 was NOT better. They leaked oil, leaked coolant, the glow plug electrical system frequently burned up, and they were a dog. But the 6.9 got better over time.
I had a friend that worked at Holiday Buick and Olds during that time, George made a fortune overhauling Roosa Master injector pumps used on the 4.3 and 5.7 Olds diesels. He did this on the side and through the shop. I don't know where he sourced the parts (this was long before the internet) but he sure had a good connection. The only catch was he made the customer purchase and have a Racor water separator installed as part of the deal. I know George made enough money off his injector pump gig to purchase a beautiful Delta 88 for his wife.
Another thing that turned people off diesel engines at that time was there were few gas stations that sold diesel fuel. Not many men were real comfortable sending their wife to a truck stop to fill up.her Olds Cutlass. I heard more than one guy share stories about their wife's experience getting fuel.
U have to be a trucker to know what goes on at truck stops ;-) . Maybe a Honda civic ISNT a bad choice for your 17 y/o daughter considering what goes on at a truck stop!
The converted 5.7 liter Diesel engines should be by far the biggest anchor motors of all time. My dad had a beautiful Chevrolet truck except for the garbage under the hood. Blown head gasket was it’s middle name.
I had the misfortune of using an Olds company car with that 350 diesel. The exhaust smoke was horrible. The engine blew up and it never ran again. Got a new non-diesel and was very happy😊
I had a 84 buick century fwd 4.3 diesel wagon and that thing gave me vertically no issues over 9 years and put it up to 374 k miles and was running fine when sold and yes it had a water seporator on it did have a trans done at about 200k miles bit that car got a solid 40 mpg on the open road at 60 mph best I ever got 45 mpg across the flat mid west traval. Wish I still had it today actually . lol. And that v6 responded much better than the v8 diesels if you floored it it went it was surprising really it would burn the front tires in first gear. Not sure why it was so responsive maybe a different cam profile from the v8 version ? And the torque was at such low rpm compared to that gas engines too. It would pull our tent trailer effortlessly as well . only thing I ever did to that engine was one water pump and air filter. Just oil changes literally , no injectors or pump cost of maintenance was almost zero over 9 years . just one trans rebuild at 200 k which is typical of any GM fwd trans and couple sets of tire's and I think only one break job as well maybe 2 can't remember for sure. If I could find a low mileage one again I would buy it hands down for sure . 👍 then buy all the nos parts I could Posibly find just in case cause the parts house is going find anything these days I'm guessing the hardest thing to find is the injector pump . but they are easily rebuilt though. With common parts for the 350 v8 . but honestly I think it was a grate engine , oh exhaust manifolds one would want to have an extra set of them for sure they were prone to cracking I guess but mine never did 👍 honestly GM finally got all the teething issues sorted on these things Basicly and then put the thing out of production but then GM is kinda famous for doing that with stuff . what ever happened at gm in 1971 kinda led them to that practice over all with R&D . so it seems.
7:00 you say you used to work for GM. Diesel engine don't compress fuel with the air. Air is compress alone. Fuel is injected after the air is compressed.
7:15 VW used the same number of head bolts on their gas and diesel engines.
Would love to see a video of you explaining the differences between the same displacement motors in GM
My grandparents had two 4.3 diesel cars; '84 Celebrity and an '84 Old Cutlass Ciera. The Cutlass was't bad, and the Celebrity actually lasted for years.
Also, one of my best buddies from High School's parents had an '84 Cutlass Supreme with the 4.3 diesel. By the time we graduated high school (92), it lasted over 200K miles.
Purely anecdotal, as we all know these were not stellar engines, but it was strange that the only 3 cars I knew of in that era, all were fairly reliable.
It's strange. My Dad's buddy had a 79 GMC pickup with that 5.7 and it went over 100,000 miles. My Dad's 80 broke a main cap at 52,000
Yeah, Adam I've just learned > From you, Diesel Engine: 4.3? Never knew V-6, or the V-8. I've owned a '96 Chevy Caprice Classic with a L-99 4.3 V-8, and I knew Chevy made a 4.3 V-6, now I learn about this 4.3 DIESEL? > WOW:! Hey congrats. you've blown past the 50K,,,,, like a rocket!
Mine still runs fabulously.
"Like being valedictorian of your reform school..." I love it.
Couldn't GM have gotten something suitable and proven from their European division? It may have been small, but maybe usable in some car lines?
Adam totally stole that line from an old Dennis Miller stand-up comedy special on HBO.
@@alantrimble2881 It's still funny.
Opel made some quality vehicles! But in usual GM fashion let GM Europe die till Peugeot bought them out and now it’s making massive profits for them!
@@mervynstent1578 Opels image is broken. The Vortec 2200 was fine in my S10. The germanized 2.2 of a friend's Opel was an unhappy engine.
@@808bigisland much better than Holden’s faith 💀
The 4.3 V6 in the smaller FWD cars do actually drive good... plenty of power in town....takes off easily, very unlabored in town...labored on the interstate above 65 mph...
3 speed trannies. Probably with a 2:28~2.41:1 final if its the GM I know & love.
Gee.. can't imagine why Oidsmobile went from top-seller to dead in 25 years.
- 5.7 diesel
- 4.3 V8 diesel
- Quad 4 sans balance shafts
All of these directly connected to the Oldsmobile brand.
Plus, the cars that did work got replaced by tinny, plasticky front-drive cars that weren't all that different from Buick or Pontiac. So the fan base couldn't buy the cars they wanted, and nobody who wasn't already an Oldsmobile fan was frankly all that interested.
The Aurora and Intrigue were nice cars that pointed towards Oldsmobile' re-establishing a place in the market, but the product development cash ran bare and that was it.
One wonders what GM could've done with the $5 billion they threw away on the Saturn experiment, and re-invested in development of the remaining products. Might that have gotten the W platform to market before the Taurus - and with proper airbags at launch? Could that have put a proper 4-speed auto throughout the front-drive lineup? Could GM have thrown more money at the interiors, suspension tuning, braking, and build quality?
What was the diesel used in the Chevette? A friends dad had one and it got phenomenal fuel economy.
Isuzu diesel. Under 2 liters, I think
Isuzu? I believe GM owned a big part of Isuzu at that time.
@@21stcenturyfossil7 Remember Joe Isuzu, portrayed by David Leisure?
1.4L Isuzu diesel, 50mpg rating in the Chevette and Pontiac T1000
There is no diesel like a Mercedes diesel. Even today those cars run better and longer than most new Mercedes
Of all of the Challenges faced by GM, Ford, and Chrysler during those malaise years - I think it was their massive size that most affected their struggle in changing their entire lineup. Combine that with management and union issues it's a miracle that they survived. I worked at major GM dealership for ~ 20 years through this era of change, and I can promise you that a lot of us were screaming at GM for all the bad decisions and bad product that resulted. Sadly, a lot of the misery could have been avoided.
All the misery could have been avoided if the stupid cafe standards hadnt been pushed so hard. Darn Cali and their liberal government
It's amazing how little output these big engines had.
Actually pretty normal for a naturally aspirated diesel.
@@EssenceofPureFlavor The gas engines of the time were pretty weak too.
Olds diesel hood ornament is representative of an engine and a piston and the red on top of the Piston is "fire"... compression ignition...
Too funny, I thought I was the only other person to see that
I still have an Olds Diesel hood Ornament.
Never had a problem but kept oil changed kept clean fuel air filter heard the horror stories love the channel keep up the good work
An interesting diesel olds developed but never released was a V5 diesel. I think it was targeted for 1983 or 84 but was cancelled. I recall reading about the development but it was quietly cancelled.
machine tool company I worked for held that engine line contract .... cancelled at the last minute / before we started cutting steel stock
Correct! I remember seeing one at the GM Proving Ground.
i had the 350 diesel in a chevy pick up i drilled the head bolts to the next size never had any trouble i put a water separator on it
No, you didn't.
@@mikehasemann9270 yes i did bought the engine with trans at a junk yard
Our local police department ran Delta 88 diesels. They didn't stand up to police duty. They also ran Chevy Citations. The city had a lawsuit against GM for the durability issues.
I did not know of the 4.3 liter diesels . I only knew they made a 350 version that was really bad. Great content and I'm leaning things
My family had a couple of the c10s with the 4.3 and 5.7 diesels. One thing we ran into alot is torque converter failure and transmission problems. I think the low end torque of the diesels didn't play well with the 700R transmission and torque converters they had from the gas engines.
What I find funny is that the Lincoln’s had a BMW I6 Diesel which was also very problematic yet nobody mentions it. Is it because it wasn’t as common? Or because GM advertised theirs so much? Or maybe because people have justly negative bias/ feelings for malaise era US engineering
It’s sad that BMW managed to fuck-up an in-line six-cylinder Diesel. That should be the easiest engine layout possible to get right. Especially for BMW.
Well, I’ll be damned. I’m a pretty big GM guy, and I used to be pretty into 4.3s, and I NEVER knew there was a 4.3 diesel. Sounds like it sucks, but still, I would’ve thought I’d have read about it or something. Cool, thanks!
That's how bad they were.
They didn't want you to know there was others besides the 350 so they didn't write about them, because there's nothing to write home about 😁
I learned to drive, in part, in an Oldsmobile Delta 88 diesel. It was quite an adventure. My college roommate told me we couldn’t run out of gas, because it was a huge hassle to get the car running again. It was clattery and slow, which didn’t make sense to me, since it was a 350 V8, until I learned that diesel engines had different power properties altogether. Sadly, another example of GM, or any American car company, coming up with a quick fix to a big problem, which yielded larger problems in the long run.
I bought a 1978 Olds Delta 88 with the 350 cu. in. diesel. At first it was a delight to drive but after a year or so quality problems arose. The gear shift pointer of the steering column no longer lined up with the letters PRND21. The state inspection failed me on that. Another quality issue; the headlights would turn off when I would hit the brakes. The dealer told me that the wiring for the headlights was routed in front of the second battery and would rub the insulation off it when the battery would slide forward causing a short circuit. The dealer routed the wires in back of the battery. Next, when I would pull into a parking space I began to notice that there was stream of oil on the ground . It didn't appear when I was driving so I thought it was someone else's car. When I went to check the oil level, I found I was almost 2 quarts low. Took it a dealer who told me that the rear end of the engine was worn away - that's where the 'rear seal' is or was actually. Thus the I had to have a new engine block installed, not with new pistons and crankshaft, etc, mind you. About a year later I took the car up to 60 on the turnpike and heard a banging noise. Dropped it back to 55 and it went away. Did that a few times to confirm it came from the engine. Back to the dealer. This time it was a bent cam shaft. It was fixed and that ended my experience with the diesel as the car traded as soon as I got it back.
I remeber my cousins parents had a 1984 Cutlass Ciera wagon with the 4.3 V6 diesel growing up.
My neighbor had one back in the 80's..nothing but problems if I remember correctly
Adam really enjoy your great videos. Grew up in this era reading the car and driver consumer reports magazines and collecting sales brochures for these now classic machines. Could you do a review of the late 70s/early 80s super small V8 engines? Olds 260, Chevy 267, Ford 255, and even Pontiac 265?
The 4.3 was actually a very good engine. it had 6 bolts per head and none of the other typical issues. they didn't make to much power but where great for the fwd cars.
True
Adam, how is Bloomfield Hills these days? My old stomping grounds btw
Drag racing guys with olds cars like to use the olds 350 diesel blocks because they have forged cranks, and rods, and they had extra webbing in the main bearing area therefore they can handle high compression pistons and can withstand higher rpm’s. And can be bored to .125 over because the cylinder bores are much thicker than the gas version.. in stock diesel form they actually weren’t bad, but the red high sulfur diesel fuel of the day was not good for emissions
A family member bought a new cutlass with the 4.3V6. the engine was replaced 3 times under warranty before she traded it in.
I bought a used Cierra diesel in ‘85:
Drove the wheels off it! Only problem was replacing harmonic damper.
Also owned a 6.2L diesel in a Suburban…that was a nightmare. Ate starters, batteries and injection pumps.
Interesting topic as I never knew about A-bodies with diesels. I imagine that those v6s were a bit heavy and would have lent those cars to having plenty of under-steer in emergency situations. Thank you for sharing Adam.
Some one was selling a Oldsmobile V8 Diesel engine on Facebook Marketplace. Not far from my place. Btw I live in Australia so it’s kinda odd to see one
90 bhp and 170 lb/ft is what you expect from a modern 1.4 diesel. The old V6 definitely makes a more interesting noise though.
Roosamaster fuel injection pump for the early Oldsmobile diesel engines were built in Stamford Connecticut, since you live in Pennsylvania talk to them.
This was a good engine, designed from the beginning as a diesel. You should not spread lies.
It never made much sense that GM olds Gambled with the automotive diesels when they had a piece in Detroit diesel still . And not too many years later by the late 1990s Detroit diesel had came out with a clean sheet design DELTA 4.0 V6 diesel to do just what they had wanted but GM already was working on the Duramax with Isuzu.
Good information. Thank you.
Detroit Diesel designed the 6.2 and 6.5 GM v8 diesel light truck engines
My dad had (2) 1980 98 Oldsmobiles that had the diesel engine, and they were nothing but money pits. They were terrible. Loved the car, just not the engines. We also had an 83 Celebrity with a Diesel engine in it. We were driving through a parking lot one time and someone stopped us and asked us if anyone was hurt in the wreck, and we asked what wreck, and he said the one you are driving! 😂
I heard it was a combination of the problems and the price of diesel went above that of conventional gasoline and stayed there.
Thank you for an informative video and sharing the wealth of knowledge. I had a feeling it was rushed to market and they were conducting research on the market. Had they got the Olds 350 diesel right just imagine the impact on the market now. I know diesels were or huge in other places like Europe. Diesel fuel is expensive today in 2022. Ford attempted diesels as we know with Lincolns from BMW. What could have been. Why were the truck diesels so much better? They use them to this day. Yes, you were right... GM lost ground during this time.
It's almost as if they purposely screwed it up.
Ford also offered a Mazda diesel in the Escort and Tempo.
@@eth39232
I remember those. I think you had to remove the engine and transaxle assembly to replace the starte..
The heavy duty pick-up truck diesels were developed as diesels instead of converting from gasoline designs. RAM worked with Cummins and adopted their tried and true B5.9, Ford worked with International Harvester and adopted their 6.9 IDI V8 and GM worked with Detroit Diesel to develop the 6.2 NA V8. For light duty usage, Ford adopted the BMW 2.4L I-6 to test the market instead of investing in hundreds of millions $ to develop their own. Other light duty diesels from European and Japanese manufacturers have been adopted by the Detroit 3 in low volume applications over the years as more of a stop gap until one of their designs was ready, or the vehicle was redesigned.
I bought a new 83 Olds Cutlas Cierra with the 4.3 diesel and 3 sp. A/T. I thought it was a great engine: it was quiet going down the road and would get 38 MPG at 65. The torque converter would lock up in 2nd and 3rd which was nice on grades although it could have used a 4 sp. Never had any problems with eng. or trans. I wish I still had it. The offset crank throws made it even firing which was very nice.
I think the 4.3 Diesel by then got a bad rap as being the same bad engine as the V8 Diesel even though by the end of production run the bugs had been sorted out.
From 40 years in the future it’s seems strange our own government did the the foreign car companies such a giant favor with the cafe standards. Cars were pretty awful back then and the diesel fuel wasn’t the highly refined stuff we have today. It was nasty sooty stinky stuff ( but dirt cheap). If you’ve ever driven a gm car with a 700r4 or 4l60 and thought to yourself “wow! that first gear is low” it’s bc it was developed in this era. Cars were so gutless they couldn’t get off the line. My dad bought an Accord at that time. Oddly enough it was made in Ohio irrc.
Thank you, man. Very well versed video, I like the way you tell the story.
Our neighbors had a 1980 all yellow Eldorado diesel - it belched stinky exhaust, you could hear the thing coming 2 blocks away and it had that greasy diesel smell just sitting there with the engine off. My thoughts are if GM used Detroit Diesel or Opel to design efficient diesel engines and allowed to perfect them before unleashing a PR nightmare they never recovered from, things might have been different.
Hah, I'll bet that the Feds didn't require an evap system on diesels at that time...
@@DanEBoyd The only emissions on the diesels before 1980 was PVC, and only EGR till the end. Diesels don't use evaporative systems...diesel doesn't evaporate like gas.
I think too many people think it’s a simple task to adapt different engines to a vehicle. The reason the “gas” Olds 350 was converted is because of the rest of the peripherals of the vehicles. A change to a Detroit Diesel or an Opel engine would mean a change to the transmission and transmission mounts, possibly the shifter, engine mounts, water pump and other belt driven accessories, on down the line. That would be a far greater cost for all of the vehicles involved, and a lot more R&D time.I’m not trying to admonish GM for past mistakes, but please don’t think that an entirely different line of engines would have been an easy or cost effective solution.
Worked at and eventually purchased an East Cleveland suburban diesel repair shop. All these models were our specialty, as the owner and most of the technicians had formal college training in diesel power plants.
I always thought the A body vehicles were far superior to their big brothers. But those cold 🥶 Cleveland winters were tough for these cars. Like a few others here, we made a ton of money servicing what the dealers had no clue about.
Great video, thanks very much!🏆
I wonder why Ford and GM didn’t look to their Euro/U.K. divisions for help. We already had proven engines that could easily meet the CAFE standards. It seems daft to try and go from making lazy V8’s to efficient 4 cylinders and diesels from scratch, when they could have had them on tap 🤔
well i happen to own a buick century with the 4.3l diesel ,,it stood on this farm when i purchased it , it is a spare parts car as the seats ect are really bad ,quite a bit of rust but i couldent just scrap it since there are good parts on it..problem is NOBODY else own one like that here in Denmark,,i will try to take a pick and post a link tomorrow
I just purchased a 1984 Cutlass Ciera brougham it is a one owner with close to 300k miles has been sitting for about 10 years but ran when parked. I think I am going to make a video series revive and drive home, then possible restore it. If the uni-body is too far gone and it probably is I will pull the engine rebuild it and add a turbo and put it in a 4x4 s10 or ranger for my daughter.
Note: the fwd 4.3 block and red block had different bell housings.....and different intake manifolds...... I was the diesel tech back in the day for an Olds/GMC dealership.