I’m not a car guy. I want to be. I’m learning. I learn by making friends with mechanics and absorbing their information. I had a car a few months ago with some overheating issues. (Got it resolved. No water in my coolant at all, using straight concentrate in a brand new, empty radiator, like a dingus. 🤦🏼♂️) But before I fixed it, someone said it might have been the thermostat. I asked a mechanic friend of mine about it. (I haven’t known him long.) He told me he’s been a mechanic for right around a decade and has NEVER seen a thermostat issue cause overheating. Is he just totally out of touch? Or did I misunderstand how the cooling system of a vehicle works? Let me know.
That is a mechanic to stay away from. If anything, they should encourage customers to replace the thermostat based on time and miles. They can slowly go bad and you really don’t want one to fail. A good time to do it is when getting some sort of service that requires the draining of the coolant. You want the engine to be at the correct operating temperature as much as possible to keep things in check. The last thing you want is to drive around with a cool engine. Not to mention what happens if it gets stuck closed because some people refuse to EVER change coolant.