Engine coolant type?

What colour of coolant should be in my radiator, 2008 M13A engine, Im 99.9% sure I seen green/blue in the bottle before she overheated but the motorfactor is telling me it should be red?????

Japanese cars and motorcycles tend to use a green coolant. Mine is an 06 and is still the original. Checked the strength yesterday and it's still good. The only stuff I've heard of is the coolant Halfrauds do and that's pink.
If you want to keep with green coolant your local Suzuki dealer should be able to supply the stuff or if you have any motorcycle dealers who use Putoline Oils, then Putoline do a green ready mixed coolant

They are both ethylene glycol but have different inhibitors and don't mix! The orange/red type are considered long life (5 years) and is the more modern type and is good for aluminium engines. The green/yellow are inorganic whilst the red/orange are organic. If mixed they can cause corrosion in the coolant system.

Antifreeze is a bit of a minefield. You can spend a week on t'interweb and you won't be much wiser.

The red antifreeze is usually OAT organic acid technology. This eats solder in old fashioned brass radiators. The Japanese don't like it. It has a 5 year life from when it was made, the stuff you buy is usually 4 years old when you get it......

Green is sometimes "Asian" antifreeze , no-one really agrees on what this is.

Blue uses old fashioned silicates, that no doubt work properly, but mercilessly slaughter all forms of life, so the tree-huggers want you to use OAT.
Blue only lasts 2 years in the engine, which is probably as long as the red will unless you check the manufacture date on the container.

This "lifetime" is untilll the corrosion inhibitors are used up, the antifreeze still won't freeze..


I ran my Jimny on red for a couple of years, and Nothing Bad seemed to happen, but I put red in my (Suzuki) SV650 made in the same year at the same time, and the water pump started dripping water out of the drain last year, so I changed them both back to blue.

However, it you allow red and blue to mix it creates an enormous jelly monster that destroys whole cities or something, so you have to do a fair amount of flushing to get the red out before putting in blue, and vice versa.

Car antifreeze is based on mono-ethylene glycol, which is sweet tasting, and very poisonous to doggies (cats too, but I don't like cats much) so don't leave any puddles or open bowls of it lying around.

You can get "Marine" antifreeze, which is based on propylene glycol, this isn't considered as poisonous- it is used in some foodstuffs, but no doubt will be linked to all manner of cancers in a few years, as it is the basis of vape fluids and there is now a very large test going on into the effects of inhaling it.

skywalker65 wrote: Japanese cars and motorcycles tend to use a green coolant. Mine is an 06 and is still the original. Checked the strength yesterday and it's still good.

It isn't the mono-ethylene glycol that deteriorates, it is the corrosion inhibitor, it won't freeze, but will probably eat its way through the heater matrix- It occurs to me that the large number of leaky heaters we get is something to do with the "wrong" antifreeze, or leaving it in too long.

Good advice on the motorcycle dealers, Suzuki no doubt put a lot of motorcycle into their cars, which is why when the 'bike started to leak I changed the antifreeze in the car PDQ)