I just recently gave my sister-in-law my 2002 Saturn SL2 with about 180k miles on it. Her boyfriend thought it was low on oil and added three quarts of oil when in reality it was less than a half quart low.

She called me to say that her car would not drive over 20mph and then proceeded to tell me about adding the oil. When I went over to take a look this evening, there was oil almost half-way up the dip stick, oil on top of of the valve cover, and a rather large puddle of oil under the car just inside the drivers front wheel which appeared to be running down the parking lot at her apartment complex. The car still ran fine at idle while I was there with no odd sounds coming from the engine. I did tell them to NOT drive it anymore.

I am planning to go back tomorrow with tools and jack stands to drain and replace all of the oil (and filter) and try to inspect for further damage. I am guessing that a main seal might be blown but not exactly sure how to tell.

Does anyone have any ideas of what kind of damage may have been done here? Is it possible that oil may have blown past some seals but the seals are still okay and everything will be fine? Just trying to get some ideas of what I may end up against.

I am guessing that there may have also been oil getting into the combustion chambers because of the performance issues she was describing. If so, how would I go about cleaning them out? May need some new plugs too. Could something else be causing the performance issues after adding too much oil?

Any thoughts here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Brad

 

I would change the oil and filter. Inspect the air cleaner and the piping to the throttle body, they may be full of oil. The oil may have come out of the crankcase breather system and not pushed any seals out.
I was part of doing this to a Nova back in the 70s. I worked at a service station and serviced cars as well as pump gas. We had three people working both functions at a very busy station. Needless to say the Nova ended up with 10 quarts of oil in it. It did not run well and pushed a lot of oil out the breathers. After we put the correct amount of oil in it all was good. No harm no foul.

 

+1 Oil traveling through PCV valve to throttle body=some may be getting burned, some may be running back through the air intake ducting depending on the mounting angle

After drain and refill I would clean throttle body and prob replae PCV valve as it is likely full of oil