mckenney56
New member
Post #1. I have a 2015 LTZ. It has what seems to be a common problem with eating water and overheating once it eats enough. I've had the dealer that sold us the car look at it 4 times and they are useless in my opinion. We had the car 4 years now and the warranty we bought with it ran out in February. Just before that I took it to them and they replaces the water inlet thing. Problem came back on month later. When I went to them wanting them to guarantee their work they said it had a past error code they didn't notice before indicating a problem with the turbo waste gate linkage. That's odd I said there was no check engine light? They wanted over $800 to replace the whole turbo assembly. Not having access to $800 at the time said no. They kept the car another day and said they determined the water issue was coolant in one of the cylinders. Their recommendation was replace the whole engine and the turbo to the tune of $8,000. WOW. The care is barely worth that. I asked if it would be safe to drive it home and they said no. Cut them loose, paid a tow truck to get it home. My daughter was using this car up until then so I decided to trade with her letting her drive my 2012 Hyundai Accent and I would take over the payments on the Sonic. Began my search for how to go about replacing the engine myself. So I studied up on the problem, joined this forum and a Facebook group too. Starting finding a lot of different answers. I checked everything I could find to check, but didn't actually replace any parts. I was about to take the plunge and order a used engine shipped to me when I decided to take the car for a spin to see if I could force it to overheat. Drove the piss out of the thing for 20 miles and no problems. Pulled into the garage and left it running until the cooling fan came on. Waiting maybe a minute and the fan turned back off. Water level in the tank was about 3/4 of an inch higher than when the engine was cold. Seemed normal to me. I've driven the car about 10 to 20 miles twice a week since then putting 140 miles on it. Nothing went wrong, Nothing. Only once did it show any sign of blowing up when I pushed it really hard it got a bit weak on acceleration when I would floor it. If you have read this far, what have you learned?
