First of all, greetings from Portugal.

I own a 98 Impreza and its my first post here.

I would like to get some feed-back about the reliability of the boxer turbo engine. Although i never had any kind of problems with my car (i am a very careful owner), some friends here have experienced some issues with the same model.

We have four more Imprezas in my neighbourhood and all of them have already experienced engine failure. I dont know what the cause is, but the broken parts were pistons and conecting rods (those litlle steel covers where the conecting rods attach to the crankshaft)...i dont know the name. Some of them got weared out, causing a knocking noise when the engine is running.

Anyway, i believe this is caused by a bad air/fuel ratio. Since we have a lot of straight roads here, we like to push max speed some times, and our cars dont seem to like this.

I saw that you guys do a fuel rail mod in your cars. What is the purpose of this??

PS-Sorry for my bad english.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Scoobysedan!

Well the boxer enigne is reliable, but like any other engine you need to maintain it regularly for it not to give you any serious problems. If you just do the usual service according to the manual you should be fine.

As for driving, the Impreza has a close ratio gearbox which is not so good for running for long times in a straight. Once I burnt all the oil in the engine while running the car on 5th gear on 4-5000rpm for one hour straight in Italy. I'm not sure but see if you can fit a 6th gear, or another gearbox for your driving habits.

Ryan.

 

Thanks for the tip Ryan. But i still wonder whats the purpose of the fuel rail mod??

Best regards.

 

I'm not sure. But fuel rail is used to regulate/deliver petrol from the tank to the engine. So you only would need to upgrade the fuel rail when you are exremely upgrading your engine for high power.