I had a MY98 UK car which suffered from piston slap on No.4 cylinder. It gradually got worse until I took it into our local dealer (Fraser Anderson - Stirling) who agreed to change the engine under warranty. They fitted a new short engine. 5000 miles later the same problem occurred - this time it turned out to be on No's. 1&3 cylinder. Subaru UK were going to send their technical expert out to have a look becasue they had never experienced such problems on such a low mileage engine. It was serviced and maintained religiously.
This merely added to other problems experienced with the car - namely clutch juddering after about 10k and the waste gate solenoid problem occurring regularly.

In short, can somebody tell me what MY cars are 'safe' to buy. In other words, what MY cars do not suffer from piston slap?? If they all do then why don't Subaru do something about it??!!??

Thanks,
Neil

 

How do you indentify that you have piston slap. Just thought I would check cos mine is coming to the end of its warranty!

 

I think although I cannot hold my hand up to say I am 100%, that the late phase 1 engines (i.e. 97/98) had this problem, and that it was fixed for the phase 2 (99 onwards).

Maybe not enough phase 2's have done enough mileage to show this up tho?

robski

 

Colin - it is easily identified by a 'knocking' sound from the engine on start up. When the engine is idling it doesn't sound too bad, but increase the revs slightly to between 1500-2000rpm and it you cannot miss it. It was the Subaru dealer who identified exactly which cylinder's had piston slap. Incidentally, i got rid of the car before it ran out of warranty. There are plenty of posts on the board outlining other peoples problems with piston slap.

Robski - Thanks for the advice. I would have thought that Subaru would have done something about the problem!! I will check out some MY99 models onwards to see if they have the same trouble. However, my car started doing it at about 30k miles which isn't unfeasible for a MY99 car.

Regards,
Neil