I have a bottle of Zerex antifreeze. It is the DEX-COOL flavor. I bought this by mistake, but that is not the question.
On the back of the bottle, it lists several makes and year of cars, and the years of my cars says I need the G-05 flavor, not the DexCool flavor. Obviously G-05 and DexCool are flavors of ZEREX, and Prestone will have its own name for the flavors it has. I'm pretty sure you guys won't know the flavors per se, but why are there flavors?
I don't care about the anti-freeze qualities of coolant because it never ever gets so cold that freezing coolant is an issue for me, but I do care about the coolant qualitites, and I suppose my biggest issue is the corrosive nature of Flavor X and the block/head and Flavor Y.
My question is, what is the purpose of the different formulations (flavors)? I can look up what the actual formulations are, but why are there different formulations? Why does the motor care about one over the others (there are three flavors of ZEREX, Original, G-05, and Dex-Cool, and I assume Prestone will have more than one flavor as well ...)?
I come from a day when we used water alone, and that was good enough. Then they gave us coolant. Now there are apparently three flavors of coolant, and it matters which one I use.