Repair-It

https://youtu.be/7YaZLY91HD0

Well this is interesting. Maybe these engines aren't junk after all. Long oil change intervals combined with oil consumption due to a crappy first rev PCV design and you have engines that are operated for 10s of thousands of miles on low oil level. Direct injection is already hard on oil. Solution: frequent changes with quality synthetic (maybe dexos rated) and update the PCV system.

I have not found one response in the comments from someone who has done frequent oil changes (like 5,000 max) and still had premature chain stretch.

Somewhat amazingly, this article seems to back up the theory:
https://www.motor.com/magazine-summary/ ... mber-2013/

Let's recap the perfect storm of things:
- Oil consumption. Plenty of other modern engines have had consumption issues, and these seem to be PCV related as opposed to ring wear. That's a good thing but it still can result in a quart every 2000 or even worse in some cases.
- Excessively long computer oil change interval. GM has revised this since but I think people were directed to go 8000, 10,000 or even 12,000 miles before changing. And people also typically run around for a while with "change oil now" displayed which is horrible.
- Direct injection, and perhaps this engine in particular being a fairly high performance design, is hard on oil. Need to use quality oil, probably synthetic Dexos-rated oil ideally.

All combined, you basically can get issues like chain stretch due to excess heat build up (lack of lube) and can also have some cam phaser issues that can result in timing codes.