rlk

My wife's 2006 B9 Tribeca just suffered an engine failure. She was driving on the highway at normal speed with no trouble and she suddenly heard a grinding noise and lost power (unable to go more than ~40 MPH) and of course got a check engine. When the engine was then started, it spewed a lot of white smoke. I drove up to where it was parked the next morning with the key to let it be towed; the tow guy started it and it sounded reasonably OK but was spewing the smoke (looked like oil smoke). Two mechanics (a Firestone shop and a dealer) said that the engine failed and looks like it needs to be replaced. The Firestone shop said there was a lot of gunk in the engine; the dealer said that there's no compression on cylinder 1.

That sounds like a catastrophic engine failure, all right, although diagnosing it would require stripping it down and both mechanics think the end result would be the same (modulo a fairly large amount of money). Replacing the engine with a used engine with 75K miles on it would cost $5600, and the car needs some superficial (but likely expensive -- a door needs repair/replacement) other work.

I haven't found any other reference to a Tribeca engine failing. It's doubly annoying because we just put $2500 into the car for miscellaneous accumulated service (tranny fluid, brakes, struts, that kind of thing). The oil was last changed in June; she has probably put about 5000~6000 miles on it since, which doesn't seem excessive for her mostly highway mileage. The Firestone place said the oil was "low", but given that failure, it's not clear to me that it means much of anything.

We bought this used 3 years ago, with 16K on it, but it was fully loaded and then some and my wife likes the car. The dealer would offer $2K in trade for it.

Any opinions on this, whether it's worth repairing it or we should look for a newer one?