why i love Dexcool, summed up in one picture

I see a LOT of GM products. I almost never see mud like this. The times I do were in neglected vehicles - leaky intake gaskets and the engines trained to run low on coolant, etc. And no the Dex-Cool isn't why the gaskets fail, it's because the gaskets are just a crap design, and dealer techs do a crap job of replacing them. Every one I talked to is proud of never using a torque wrench. That's a good way to get a plastic intake gasket to fail.

Fords that used that type of gasket also have gasket failure issues, and they don't use Dex-Cool.

As far as I know and saw as a tech, Dexcool was really only terrible in its early years. But, in those early years, it ruined millions of cooling systems. As mentioned before, once it starts to looking like that, it seemed like no amount of flushing would ever keep it from continually turning new coolant brown and clogging radiator tubes and heater cores.

Whatever they call Dexcool these days has nothing like the problems of original dexcool and I wouldn't have any reservations or special precautions about using it.

wbjones wrote: and if so why does GM still use it ? and I'll ask again, do I flush and switch as soon as I run out of warranty ?

Because they signed a massive contract to use it exclusively.

I flushed mine after having three heater cores replaced under warranty. I also had to flush the system every winter in order to get heat. It doesn't void the warranty any more than changing your own oil does. If I bought a new vehicle with Dexcool in it, I would honestly change it in the first week and sleep like a baby.

You should have seen the sandy orange jello that came out of that cooling system every time.

Can't speak to any new formulations, but I certainly don't trust it. One of the things we Impala SS/Caprice owners determined was that cavitation and aeration were definite killers. If you let the coolant level get low, it sucked air out of the pressure reservoir when you accelerated. It made what we call "dashboard waterfall," because it sounded like a waterfall in the dashboard as the air bubbles went through the heater core. You could almost set your watch by the fact that you would lose heat within the month. Every Caprice/Impala owner can pretty much flush our heater cores in 10 minutes because we've all done it a dozen times.

Everyone switched to green and never recorded a single problem. I switched to green at about 20k and never had a single cooling issue ever again in 140k.