Headgaskets a second time?

You must be out of your mind!

A head gasket failure at such early milage (as most people report) given todays technology is absolutely inexcusable.

If it is true that Subaru tries to save money by putinng cheap head gaskets than this is outright negligence, and needs to be called by its name.

My personal suspicion is that its not the gaskets' fault. Its most likely an adaptive approach to engineering. They've kept increasing the volume of their engines from 2.0 to 2.2 to 2.5, boring and reboring the same block, right (?) that finally they've got a serious problem on their hands. Probably afraid to admit its cause- a mighty embarrasment- adaptive engineering!! Was the 1.8L also basically the same block?

MN

Always a possibility I'd be out of my mind to argue against.

Actually, in listening to my machine shop owner buddy, it's "today's technology" that CAUSES such early failures. In addition to what he'd told me, there's another item that comes to mind: how many people have their heads retorqued on Subaru engines? It's a PITA to get to 'em, courtesy of the design of the engine, so it's probably seldom if ever done. Regular retorquing of heads on SOME makes of engines has proven helpful, IME. If Subaru DOESN'T use "stretch bolts" or whatever they're called, which are supposed to help avoid the need for retorquing, then I can see another point where a problem could start.

Name me a mass produced car that's NOT built by someone cutting corners here or there? Any mfr's gonna be looking at the numbers--hmmm, if we save a buck by using a cheaper part, but it costs us $1000 in warranty claims, we need to rethink this. OTOH, if we save $1000 and it costs us a buck in warranty claims, let's go with it. We see lots of complaints (seemingly) about headgaskets here, but how representative is our "local" population on the NGs and forums vs the "global" population of Subie owners? Maybe the headgasket "problem" doesn't qualify as a "real" problem in the big picture? You know what I mean: if MY car blows a gasket, that's 100% failure rate (in MY mind), but if mine's the only one in 1000 that fails, that's a tenth of a percent rate, perhaps well within any engineering or manufacturing limits as set by the mfr. I'm not saying this isn't a problem, just exploring how big it is.

There we agree. This is what my machine shop buddy was telling us.

But we could argue the causes forever and not change a thing. So let's return to my original question: how many people have a SECOND failure?

Rick