Hey everyone.

Today while driving my 2009 LR2 in the highway the overheating light and alarm came on so i stopped the car immediately and i took a look at the engine and i am not sure if what i saw is correct!!

it seems i have a mix of oil and coolant all over my engine, but i didn't have any issues with the car and it didn't stop functioning or anything.

any ideas on what might have caused this ?? you can take a look at the pictures below.

 

That is all kinds of wrong...

Headgasket? What's the oil look like?

 

I checked the oil and it's clear there is no sign of water. The coolant tank in the other hand is a different story, it's a milky brown color.

 

I would guess it does look that way considering it sharted on the motor.

It sounds like you are getting oil into the coolant, one way that can happen is head gaskets, another is if it has a oil cooler built into the radiator. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the LR2 to help to much.

 

M7,

Because of the location it looks like the cap vented due to over pressure.

And that your coolant is being contaminated by something.

Engine oil mixing with coolant due to a blow head gasket can cause this.

Transmission fluid mixing with Coolant should will also look like what you've shown.

It is possible that the heat exchanged for the transmission has failed.

See the picture for the heat exchanger (ignore the red arrow that was for a different post)

The picture shows: radiator and fans (grey), heat exchanger (Blue), ATF lines (green and Brown), and Transmission (grey)

Note: this is exactly what ArmyRover pointed out, I am just adding a picture

One last item this only applies if you have an automatic transmission, if you have a manual transmission you can disregard this message


Please post the solution

Happy Motoring

Paul

 

coolant color is red/orange

how come it becomes brown

did you ever put non coolant/water like coolant sealer?

 

The Brown sludge is what is know as an emulsion.

Water + Ethylene Glycol + Motor Oil = Brown Sludge

 

Update to my previous post

The failure can be caused the heat exchanger for the transmission (as shown above)

But based on the failure that others are seeing it is more likely the heat exchanger for the engine oil and coolant

The picture is for a slightly different 3.2 but it is similar to the LR2 version

The part that fails is the rectangular part with the stacked aluminum plates, the oil and the coolant pass thru this to transfer heat from the oil to the coolant.

For reference the part next to the stacked plates in the oil filter housing.

 

This is the engine oil cooler, make sense