How do the Hemis hold up to high milages anyway? My 318 Magnum from my 98 Ram burns a ton of oil at 150k ish miles, no smoke ever but I need a careful eye on the dipstick (rings I figure).
Your 318 probably lets some oil past the rings (or valve guide, valve stem seals) - with cat converters, slight amounts of oil consumption can get burned up within the cat and you may not see the (slight) amount of smoke, as it dissapates quickly that you can't see it from the rearview mirror like older, pre-cat vehicles might show.
On a lot of (not diligently maintained) newer cars, I noticed slight oil smoke on decel (worn valve guides, valve stem seals) or some smoke when the accelerator is depressed (worn rings, upper cylinder walls) under load, but its only noticeable by someone driving behind the car, since its a small amount.
On an engine with significant wear or oil consumption issues, unburnt oil will make it past the cats and then the tell-tale blue smoke appears.
In the NW area, [esp. with automatics] I notice a lot of drivers will fire up a cold engine, throw it into gear even before fast idle settles down (injected engines only need 15-30 seconds to drop down from high idle) and tear off at 25-35mph and you can hear the upper end of the engine being noisy as the cold oil is flowing as thoroughly through the valvetrain.
Couple that with our winter temps in the 20s-30s and I see a lot of fairly newer (3-5 years old) cars that smoke and exhibit valvetrain noise of some noise from the bottom end of the engines relatively early on.
I recommend any one buying a recent model car to have compression tests and cylinder leak-down testing done...the above scenario is pretty common, younger drivers and automatics don't understand the concept of allowing the oil to flow for 30 seconds or so after startup and not getting on the throttle so heavy from a cold startup.
