Wear on valves

THE Falcon is generally pretty good for valve recession, but it is hard to say when the head might need rebuilding. It depends of the type of driving you're doing, but I would think you'd get 150,000km or more out of it before it had to be rebuilt. A taxi would get more because it spends more time running fully warmed up than the average family car. Driving long distances won't hurt it. The valve wear would most likely be less for the same reason it's less on a taxi. Ford says its engineers reported a bent conrod caused by an engine backfire in one of its BA development cars, and for that reason it used the beefier XR6 conrods in the e-gas engine, so that's a possible problem on gas. It's more likely to be a problem on a vapour-mixer system, which is what Ford uses, than it is on a more modern gas injection system, which is less prone to backfiring.