Perhaps you saw the report on the K16 head gasket situation.Apart from the high-lighted disaprity between the treatment of Roverand Landrover customers, are these engines as bad as reported ?My local garage has two in this week, £600 a time ( Rover main dealerswont even consider doing the work, insisting a new engine is fitted )Could the known inlet manifold gasket weakness be a factor, leading tosubsequent over-heating, and head distortion ?Am I sitting on a time bomb, or have I a reasonable chance of 'getting away with it ? ' the engine lasting to a decent mileage, say150,000 ! Clearly this adverse publicity is going to seriously damageany residual value. In the car maintenance group, 1.4s seem to feature far more than 1.6s! Is this representative or are there simply more of them, or are theyinherently more unreliable ?I'd be interested to hear anyone's views on this issue.Andy PandyTo e-mail, address hopefully, self-explanatory !

To be fair the trouble is mostly with the 1.8 litre engines and only withpre 2001 models. Of course you could still have HGF with later models butits rare. Basically the MGs are no worse than any other cars. Rover dealerswill do the work, but they wouldn't be the cheapest !!Watchdog was being very unfair to MG-R, the numbers of cars involved arehigher than average but not massive.I notice there was no mention of Ford focus airbags going off on their own(far worse in my opinion) or Toyota avensis rear suspension failing.... Itwas just another anti British story. Would lotus use the engine if it wasinherently unreliable ?? No.

True a driver should look after his car, but the K is VERY delicate. Anaccidental water loss like a punctured radiator (for whatever reason), or afaulty thermostat will kill a K in minutes. My parents Subaru Legacyoverheated very badly, twice. It had virtually no water at all and theengine was too hot to touch. Despite that it needed nothing more than a newradiator. No HGF... nothing, and it had already done 170K at the time. Nowthat is tough !! If you did that to a K it would have warped so much itwould have gone from a straight 4 to a V4 !!!

Actually its not, the subaru legacy my parents have is a 1990 model and onlycost about 50% more than a 414SLi of the time, and its a 2.2 4WD!!. Price isno excuse anyway.You can get an imprezza that uses the same basic engine for £14,950 (2.0GXSport AWD), an MG ZR 160 costs £15,215 (both 5drs).

Watchdog and the K16 engine ?

Nov 06, 2003 25 Replies

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Paul S. Brown 22 years ago

The engine is just a *lot* less forgiving of this than most other engines. Maybe the phrase I wanted was "pernickety" rather than "high maintenance". Same basic difference.

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Alan 22 years ago

Something most instruction manuals tell you to do. If you do not, you should take the fall for the state of the engine

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Nom 22 years ago

Yup.

And if the owner can't be bothered to do that, then he can be described as crap. As I said, the K-series has a zero tolerance approach to crapness :)

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chris 22 years ago

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Nom 22 years ago

But then a Subaru Legacy is about three times the cost as a K-Series car. You get what you pay for.

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chris 22 years ago

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