Our 2017 Ram ProMaster 2500 needed a new engine at 98,000 miles. This is the whole story, including the part where I did not act on it fast enough.
If you want the wider picture of what eight years and 130,000 miles in this van has cost, that lives on the ProMaster reliability page. This page is just the engine.
It Started as a Click#
There is a general clicking that this motor makes. I noticed it, and then over time it kept getting louder.
That slow escalation is the part worth paying attention to. It was not a bang or a warning light. It was a sound that was a little worse each month, which is exactly the kind of problem you can talk yourself into ignoring, because nothing about any single day is alarming.
I did a lot of research once it got loud enough to bother me, and I found plenty of other people describing the same noise and saying these go out. That is what moved it from background annoyance to something I needed to deal with.
The Warranty Clock Is Why We Moved#
Two things pushed us to finally get it checked: the noise getting louder, and how close we were to the end of our extended warranty.
We had bought a bumper-to-bumper policy with the van from the Ram dealership in Boulder, Colorado, for roughly $2,300. It ran to 100,000 miles. Estimate
The engine let go at 98,000.
I want to be plain about what that means, because it is the single most consequential fact on this page: we were about 2,000 miles from having no coverage at all. Had I kept telling myself the clicking was nothing for another few months of driving, the entire repair would have been ours.
The factory powertrain warranty was long gone by then. On a gas 3.6L that is 5 years or 60,000 miles, not the 5-year/100,000-mile figure people repeat for the diesel. We were 38,000 miles past it.
The Warranty Company Made Them Scope It#
Our shop could hear the noise. That was not enough.
The warranty company required the engine to be video scoped before they would approve anything. A camera went down into the engine so somebody could look at the actual parts and document the wear. Only after that did the diagnosis become official: the rollers were going bad. Reported
Then came the part nobody warns you about. They asked for every oil change record. Not a summary, the actual history. We had them, because we have run full synthetic every 4,000 to 7,000 miles for eight years and kept the paperwork.
The claim was approved. I am convinced it was approved because we could produce that history, and I think that is the most useful thing in this entire article for somebody else driving one of these.
What It Cost#
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Total engine job | ~$8,000–9,000 |
| Extended warranty covered | about half |
| Our share | ~$4,000 |
| What the policy cost us up front | ~$2,300 |
Estimate These are our figures from memory, not receipts. Ranges are honest ranges, not hedging.
We paid our share to get a remanufactured engine instead of a used one. Given that the van is also our house, buying a known quantity instead of somebody else’s unknown mileage was worth the difference to us.
That reman engine has about 32,000 miles on it now and the van reads 130,039.
What the Record Says About This Engine#
Everything above is ours. This section is not, and I am labeling it that way on purpose.
The noise has a name. Owners, shops and parts suppliers call it the Pentastar tick, and it is well documented across Chrysler’s 3.6L V6 family. Reported
The mechanism that gets described repeatedly: needle bearings inside the valvetrain rollers wear out, play develops, and components that are supposed to roll against the camshaft start hammering it instead. Once metal starts coming off, that debris goes into the oil and circulates. The commonly cited tell, beyond the noise, is metal glitter in the oil filter. The repair people recommend is replacing the rockers and lifters as a set rather than chasing one bad part. Reported
There is also litigation. A class action was filed January 28, 2022 in Delaware, case No. 1:22-cv-00116, alleging a valvetrain defect in the 3.6L Pentastar, naming rocker arms, lifters, camshafts and the engine control module software. Reported
⚠️ Read the vehicle list before you get your hopes up. That filing covers the Chrysler 300, 200, Town & Country and Pacifica, the Dodge Challenger, Charger, Durango and Grand Caravan, the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler, and the Ram 1500. The ProMaster is not on it, even though it carries the same engine family. Our van was not part of that case and our repair had nothing to do with it. I am including this because it explains why so much has been written about this noise, not because it is a door you can walk through.
Reported failures cluster in roughly the 2014 to 2020 model years, with commentary suggesting later engines improved. Ours is a 2017, which sits inside that window.
If You Hear It, Go Now#
If you hear a click that is getting louder, go now. Not at the next oil change. The expensive part of this failure is not the noise, it is what the loose parts do to everything they touch while you wait. I waited, and I got lucky that the timing landed inside our coverage rather than outside it.
Check your extended warranty’s mileage ceiling before you decide to wait. If you are inside 10,000 miles of it, that decision is worth real money.
Keep every oil change record. Ours is the reason the claim was paid.
Do not assume you are covered by anything you read about the Pentastar. The ProMaster sits outside the class action’s vehicle list. Whatever protection you have is whatever is written in your own paperwork.
One Van, One Data Point#
I can tell you this happened once, to our van, at 98,000 miles, in Colorado, in 2023.
I cannot tell you how common it is across every ProMaster on the road. I have one van and one data point. The people quoting failure rates for this engine are mostly guessing, and I am not going to join them. What I can say is that when I went looking, I found no shortage of company.
I also cannot tell you your repair will cost what ours did. Ours was Colorado, 2023, with about half of it covered.