RomRaider

All I can say is wow, Subaru needs to get their act together quick cuz this will most likely be my first and last Subaru if I don't see some improvements.

I'm scared to drive my 07 everyday but this now seems like basically the whole Subaru line is being recalled. Which = trouble.

Hopefully what someone said above about Subaru sending in intact long blocks is true because if the retard techs at the dealerships have to rebuild hundreds of motors human error is going to probably cause people to come back for rebuilds very soon.

That was just someone's guess - I am hoping that is the case, but nothing has been confirmed.

Gotcha, it would be a great idea though.

I agree... you'd think the subaru certified techs would be good at that stuff, but this 07 sti I'm working on now was rebuilt by subaru (piston 4 failed). They were yanking so hard to get the tranny off, they bent the clutch throwout bearing to the point where the clutch was hanging, slipping, and making a lot of noise. The owner brought it back to the dealer and they told him that clutch isnt covered by warranty. Apon taking the motor apart, it had one 2.0L timing cover in the front, a replaced cylinder head, and everything was WAAAAY over-torqued. Bad news...

Damn. That is the kind of thing that worries me. Some people are non-chalant about the whole thing - "don't worry, its under warranty!", but I just don't trust the dealership to do a major repair like this correctly based on my past experience (not Subaru, but dealers in general).

I've done a LOT of work on warranty cars because people are afraid to go back to the dealer.... they'd rather pay to do it right.

The other thing that sucks about it is for lets say 07 sti that I'm working on now. This dude gets a piston replaced under warranty. They put another crappy stock piston in. Ok no big deal, the stock pistons are good enough for stock. But the piston failed because of a bad injector. Do you think they cleaned, checked, or replaced the injectors? Nope. And the same piston broke again. The car is still under warranty, but they wonna slap on a grand to replace the clutch while they are in there(which they screwed up the first time). And you know they are going to re-use the timing belt even though its off twice now, and they are gonna charge another 400 to change it if he asks them to do it. Just plain old sucks. Another thing I noticed after taking the motor apart is that the timing belt tensioner was totally blown out. It had no pressure at all. So that was a ticking time bomb... The tech probably over-tigntened it in the vice when re-compressing it.

So for the same money, I'm doing a new clutch, forged pistons, new tensioner and pulleys and timing belt, and I will use correct torque specs. And it gets fixed right.

Yeah, I do my own maint/repairs unless it is a costly warranty claim. Hopefully Subaru can narrow down the problem and maybe my wife's 09 FXT won't be one of the impacted cars. It runs great, doesn't consume any oil (maybe a smidge over the 1k break-in), no unusual noises, and the IAM is 1. Still not sure what Subaru means by internal wear issue which seems intentionally vague.

I would imagine not every single one is bad, but they must have some out of spec parts here and there. Since there is no recall or public announcement yet, it cant be as bad as people are making it out to be. Subaru just wants to see what it is before they get hammered on warranty claims...

I wonder how closely they can track internal engine components. That is, let's say there's a bad batch of pistons of a known quantity. Would they know exactly which engines these were installed in and the corresponding vehicle? Or just a general idea?

Something just smells fishy about the whole thing. I mean, Subaru isn't generally very aggressive about recalls (ex. 02 wrx fuel leak). And with a couple of failed engines now overseas, they end up stopping sales on a very specfic vin range while saying at the same time that they basically don't know the cause the failure. It almost sounds like they decided to change a part mid production to save some money and then had an oh s***! moment when they saw these failures were due to this part. That is why they know exactly what the starting production number is as they know exactly when they changed over to the part. The alternative is that there was an extremely large batch of a bad parts or change in assembly that impacted this large number of vehicles, which doesn't seem as likely.

Is Subaru now controlled by Toyota? I know that they bought GM's block of shares but I don't know if the management was replaced by Toyota management. That may explain the difference in approach to handling a recall.

On something like engines, I would expect that lots would be traceable. They should know which batch of pistons or which batch of ringlands went into which batch of engines. I would be very surprised if their tracking system didn't allow that.

I don't know. I thought Toyota only had a minority share in Subaru. Be interesting to see how this plays out.

I can't believe this. It just shows how negligent these techs are. They don't really car for the people's cars. They just throw the parts in and thats it...

The dealer can't even get oil changes right to be honest. They over filled my car by a ton on its first oil change (its and 07 STI) and it smoked and I feared for the worst. They're the freaking Subaru dealership, it's their car, they should know exactly how much each model takes. It did burn off and hasn't consumed a drop since. At the next change (800 miles ago) I told them they over filled it and they did get it right. But I don't think I'm going back to them for oil changes.

You only need a small amount of the stock to take control of a company.

Renault installed Carlos Ghosn as the head of Nissan even though Renault only owned 20-30% (I think) of the company.

Suppose three companies each controls 30% of the stock. Who controls the company?

Toyota's 8.7% stake didn't even get it a seat on FHI's board of directors.

Well, I don't know all the details. Just asking.

I thought Toyota doubled their stock to 17%.

I thought Fuji Heavy Industries was a publicly traded company. Usually, 17% of a publicly traded company would be enough to dominate control. Who else are the major shareholders. I tried looking on wikipedia but it just said Renault and GM.