Thread: D4 3.0 SDV6 catastrophic failure

Originally Posted by discomatt69

As an owner of a 3l D4 I take offence to such scandalous statements
it also makes me nervous due to it being factual

I've learned to keep a watch on oil pressure. Once it starts dipping, then bearings (or possibly pump) require attention. For bearings, the only solution is to rebuild the motor if you want to keep the car.

My suspicion is that it will be too late to save the crankshaft once oil pressure drops, not that the thought stopped me from fitting an oil pressure gauge to my TDV8 with the same bearings. It's that the factory bearings don't have a wear layer under the ultra thin hard-wearing, electrostatically-applied coating, so if the hard coating fails then the bearing very quickly disintegrates whereas a tri-metal bearing has a proper 2nd wear layer. Note that the 2.7 and 3.6 also use the same main and big-end bearing shells apart from the thrust bearing attached to the rear main shells.
The replacement engine in the D4 is ultra-responsive, possibly due to the valves, turbos and injectors only having done 120K kms.