Forgive me if this is a subject of previous discussions.
I own a 2013 Fit Sport. Bought it brand new. 113K miles. Have done all maintenance and taken good care of it.

While driving home from work two days ago I saw the oil pressure indicator flash for a split second when I came to a stop. Then it went out and did not come on again. Once I got home I checked the oil. Nothing on the dipstick. Added 2 quarts. Nothing but the dipstick tip. Third quart it registered as full. My last oil change was 2149 miles ago.

Damn.

I called my mechanic and he said it was most likely the piston rings and that one or more had probably seized. Further he said no one repairs piston rings and that replacing the engine in his opinion was too expensive. His suggestion was simply to buy more oil and check the oil every 1000 miles.

The car motor now has a lower, throaty sound to it and it stumbles before a cold start. Once running it seems okay otherwise. I did put a rag into the tailpipe and it was coated with a ton of black sludge.

Here's my question: is my Fit on life support or by just adding oil can I keep it going? I had hopes of this car going to 200K but now I don't know if I need to start looking for another vehicle or not.

Also wondering if given this amount of oil consumption (3 quarts in 2149 miles) if will pass smog the next time I'm due (1.5 yeas).

Thanks for any advice you guys can offer. This Fit is the best car I've ever owned but darn it I thought that it would have more life in it than 113K miles.

Bill

 

Not to state the obvious, but it would have if you hadn't driven it for days/weeks/months with low oil.

My first piece of advice would be to check your oil more often than every 2149 miles, but I suspect you know that now. Definitely do not wait 1000 miles to check your oil again. Until you have a handle on how quickly the oil level is dropping you should check every day or two.

Similarly, if a warning light comes on in your vehicle, take action (in this case, shutting off the car and checking your oil) sooner rather than later.

My second piece of advice would be to get an immediate oil and filter change, because all the wear metals produced while you were driving around with low oil are still in the oil (or clogging the filter) and still doing damage. I would probably change the oil and filter again in a couple hundred miles to be safe. And, just to repeat myself, check your oil regularly from now on.

We're all on life support, some of us just have less time than others. In your case, keeping the oil level full will undoubtedly be better for the car than letting the level drop again, but if the engine was badly damaged it's not going to improve.

Unfortunately, no one here can predict how long your Fit will keep running because we can't know how much damage you did. If you want an idea, get a bore scope and check the cylinders for scoring (a bit of a pain on a Fit because of the awkward spark plug access).

I would investigate the price of a junkyard Fit engine and installation for yourself. It's probably not as expensive as you might imagine; whether it is too expensive for you depends on your financial situation and how much you value this Fit vs getting a different car.

 

Change the oil and filter. Send the used oil to Blackstone Labs for analysis. The report will tell you what is in the used oil, including metal particles.

 

In addition to what has already been mentioned...

Are you certain it was properly filled at your last oil change?

Have you looked underneath for oil leaks? This one should be very obvious with that much oil loss.

Oil burning destroys catalytic convertors from what I've heard and read.

The most important part would be a proper diagnosis of where the oil is going.


DIY Dave on YouTube has a whole series on his Toyota Corolla oil burning issue with varying results with different possible fixes. Ultimately, he rebuilt his engine.

The Berryman's piston ring soak has been successful for other YouTubers. Valvoline's new Restore & Protect is supposed to address sticky piston rings. BG Engine cleaner has also worked for others. DIY Dave tried all of these. I tried Valvoline R&S but my seals leaked horribly after ~1000 miles. I switched back to high mileage semi-synthetic to slow the seal leaks. The stuck piston rings issue has become prevalent with low tension rings for better fuel economy over the last couple of decades or so. The Internet/YouTube is full of info on this.

Finding out if this is YOUR problem or not would be key. As you can see in DIY Dave's videos, that's not necessarily easy or quick.

Mark

 

I got "the ick" reading this... It's spitting oil from the exhaust... I would say stop now. right now, if you have the means... and get a new engine.
your catalytic converters will be coated in oil, and I can't see that passing emissions... though here in GA I actually punched out a downstream catalyst for a friend (there was no post o2 sensor for that one) and made the vehicle passable for the largely aesthetic federal standards at a cost of a few new exhaust gaskets..
(the cause -- severe exhaust leak at manifolds, still had to be fixed).

but you may not have means.. so then, yes, do keep oil in it. establish the leak rate
I bet that this was another case of cross-threaded oil pan drain plug. Some other such nonsense.

 

Allow me to be the hopeless and hysterical one in this thread.

1) You were three quarts down on a four quart capacity. That is catastrophic engine oil loss. I don't see how you can just add oil as you go and keep on driving.

2) Your last oil change was 2149 miles ago. That would be the first red flag that I would investigate. Who did it, and what did they do?

3) I don't know anything about seized piston rings. Maybe your mechanic is right. Do you have black smoke billowing out of your exhaust pipe? Why would piston rings fail on a 113k mi. Fit?

 

Thanks for all of the responses. Just to clear up a few questions/comments:

• The oil was full at the last oil change. New filter as well.
• The mechanic is maybe the most reliable and best old school Honda mechanic in Los Angeles.
• I've never checked the oil every thousand miles on this car. Never thought to, my error if that was wrong. It has never blown smoke and up until this incident oil was never an issue.
• There are zero leaks. Period.
• The car has been driven every day. It is basically a commuter. I drive 18 miles roundtrip a day to work. If you don't know Los Angeles, that is an hour each way by freeway.

For now I'm just adding oil and obviously checking the oil every 1000 miles. Just a bit of a shocker because this literally came out of nowhere. My Fit has been the best and most reliable, trouble free car I've ever owned.

 

To repeat myself again, if you want any hope of this car lasting to even 120K miles, do not wait 1000 miles to check the oil level. Based on the your description of your driving, that's something like two months.

Until you know exactly how quickly the car is burning oil, and until you know that the rate is constant, you should check the oil frequently. I would do it every day or at worst every week. If you're already spending an hour each way to get to work, an extra 30 seconds to check the oil in the morning is a minor cost.

As an aside, the type of driving you describe where 9 miles of forward progress takes you an hour (i.e., you're either idling or creeping most of the time) is the worst-case scenario for any car. You should be following the severe service maintenance schedule in the owner's manual.

 

That's good advice, Drew21, and duly noted. I will do that and post results.

 

Oh boy, time to pick on @Mister Coffee!

That's about what it takes to get the oil pump to start sucking air (oil pressure drops low enough to trigger the warning light) on most Hondas. There's videos of people intentionally destroying Honda engines by draining all the oil, then putting a brick on the accelerator pedal. It often takes half an hour for the engine to lock up... The chuckle-heads get real bored in the mean time. Unless OP was doing hard acceleration pulls with the oil light on, I doubt there's much (if any) oil starvation damage. Oil was still circulating, low load, the bearings are probably fine. However that doesn't resolve the root issue.

The 2012 Insight (an L13 hybrid) had a recall (maybe just a service bulletin? not sure how it was handled) for defective low-tension piston rings causing oil burning. My step father's Insight was showing symptoms with under 30k on the odometer (initially a VTEC oil pressure switch code, then a destroyed spark plug). Honda had us drag it out (keeping the oil topped up) until the engine shut down, leaving him on the side of the road at 54k. Their solution was to replace the engine under warranty since they had service history showing relevant issues.
ANYWAY. 2012-ish (possibly low-tension) L-series piston rings. Hmm.

Engine oil testing might be useful. Vanilla engine health tests like a compression test, leak-down test, and bore-scope the pistons to try to pin down the nature of the problem. Though TBH that's all probably irrelevant. Any failure that dumps enough oil down the exhaust, fast enough that it shows up at the tail pipe, is going to require major engine work. A rebuilt engine is probably going to cost 2-3x what a salvage engine does, and figuring out the root cause and extents of the damage is only necessary if you're thinking about repairing the engine. Unless you're willing to take on an engine rebuild yourself, "just drop in another engine" is the name of the game here.

 

You may have hope. Ive met guys that would drain oil, put gallons of diesel in it until it soaked the rings and let sit for a solid month. Afterwards they'd drain it all out for a good day or so, prime with fresh oil + filter (cheap), run for maybe an hour, then switch out oil + filter again.

Your first step should be bore scoping the cylinders. If blow by is found from a compression check then you've found the issue. If compression checks perform leak down. Sticking rings can be resolved by above mentioned. Just make sure you're mindful of diesel locations during this process and not to hydrolock anything. Good luck

 

@bobski What is a "seized piston ring"?

I sold my '08 Fit after driving 2.5+ miles with no engine oil in it (oil drain plug fell out). Maybe that was a panicky move on my part, but I didn't want to take a chance.

 

The piston rings have to move/expand/contract (very slightly) to seal against the cylinder wall. If they can't, they are "seized" and oil from the crankcase passes into the combustion chamber which is no bueno.

 

... The compression rings get jammed in their piston grooves (or the oil control ring filled-in) over time by carbon deposits. Modern oils and fuels have detergent packages to mitigate carbon build-up, but those detergents get used up over time. Extended oil change intervals, low-quality oils (little or no detergent package), and low-quality gasoline all contribute to (or fail to mitigate) the carbon build-up problem.
There's lots of shade-tree piston-soak "solutions" out there, but the only one I've seen work is to remove the pistons, remove the rings, and scrape out the carbon with a piston groove cleaning tool.

 

There's no way outta this one.. if oil makes it to the tailpipe, that's curtain call at least for emissions -- and then for the engine because rebuilds cost too much..and. You know, this isn't physically damaging to the cats. I kinda wonder if it could be cleaned off but then... oil baked on at 7-800 degrees F kinda sounds like.. I'd rather pop some staples in my leg than figure that out. I was a fancy battle tank mechanic! And a drug addict! and then I sold shoes for a while.
... I'm not sure how that averages out against your guy but it's three things, and he's just the best mechanic in LA, which is one thing.

You're gonna want a new engine/car, and though i enjoy my own jokes, I don't enjoy giving this opinion. I'm bad at a lot of stuff, including convincing people of things. and then separately, on an unrelated note, i'm right about this.

also separately, drunk.