Die, dye, die

So the Green Goblin, my 2012 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon is coming up on its 5th year. It was manufactured at the end of August 2011, I bought it in October 2011, and it is now late July 2016.

2012 was the last year that Chrysler used HOAT (Hybrid Organic Acid Technology) coolant in their cars. This is a hybrid silicate-OAT coolant that was used by a number of auto makers in the 2000's, including Ford, Mercedes, and BMW. And HOAT has a rated lifespan of 5 years.

So time to change it. The formulation that Chrysler used for the 2012 model year Jeeps is Valvoline Zerex G-05. Chrysler's coolant was dyed pink from the factory. When I changed the fluid in my 2006 Wrangler, I used the "regular" G-05, which was dyed yellow. So anyhow, I had a gallon of the G-05 left over from then, and mixed it with a gallon of distilled water in a bucket and poured it through a funnel back into the bottle and into the distilled water jug. Still yellow.

Of course, I needed a second jug to have the 2.6 gallons needed to fill the radiator, so I popped out to the auto parts store two blocks away. Yep, they had some G-05. $20 poorer, I came back home and did the same thing -- one gallon of G-05, one gallon of distilled water in the bucket.

And....

WTF? They changed the motherfucking dye to fucking orange! Old on the right, new on the left.

This makes no goddamned sense. Yeah, I know it's just dye, but orange is the color of GM's Dexcool, a pure unsilicated OAT that is utterly incompatible with G-05 HOAT. As in, if you mix the two it'll gum your radiator and heater core right up and Bad Things will happen. So tell me, if you have a GM or Ford car (Ford switched to Dexcool recently) with its *orange* coolant, and you come across this plastic distilled water jug full of premixed *orange* coolant and put it in your car, what the fuck do you think is going to happen?

Yeah, bad, bad things.

Have the people at Valvoline lost their ever-lovin' motherfucking minds?! Or did they, like, buy a stake in a radiator and heater core manufacturer and they want to drive demand? I mean, look. Yellow was pretty distinctively G-05. Not as distinctively as pink, maybe, but you couldn't confuse it with Dexcool or with the old green shit that had to be changed every two years or it'd clog your cooling system sure as the sun rises in the morning. But fucking orange is used by pretty much everything that's incompatible with G-05. As in, you mix orange coolant and orange coolant, and bad things are going to happen.

Oh well. It's just dye. And both of the jugs of Zerex G-05 say they comply with the Chrysler spec for my Jeep, so I have no trouble mixing the orange and the yellow. But man, this is some stupid fucking shit. Just sayin'.

- Badtux the Coloring Penguin