Chevrolet Ecotec (badge, not an engine)

Ecotec is a badge, not an engine, and General Motors has used it more loosely than any comparable name in this catalogue.

Our own rows show it on 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5 and 3.8 litres, across Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Holden, Pontiac and Saturn. The 3.8 is a pushrod V6 with nothing whatever in common with the 2.2 four-cylinder beside it under the same name.

What to establish is the RPO code — L61, LE5, LAF, LE9, LV7 — which is on the engine and in the vehicle's build sheet. Every useful answer follows from it and none follows from the badge.

Two faults recur across the four-cylinder Ecotecs specifically and are worth naming, because they are what most owners meet:

• The timing chain and its tensioner, on the 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4. The symptom is a rattle on a cold start that lasts a second or two and then goes — and a chain that rattles is already stretched, which advances into a running fault rather than staying a noise.
• Oil consumption on the 2.4, from the piston rings and the PCV arrangement, well enough known to have been the subject of a class action. An Ecotec 2.4 using oil is not necessarily worn out and is worth diagnosing rather than condemning.

Neither applies to the 3.8, which is a different engine entirely.