How can an oil filter come loose after 3K miles?

[sdowney717]

I have yet to see in 3 decades of working and driving cars, the oil trouble light break.
Anyway, this is something a driver should verify comes on when starting then goes off as it catches and runs.

Cars ought to simply power off the fuel pump after a delay if the oil pressure goes away.

 

[SteveSRT8]

Originally Posted By: sdowney717

Cars ought to simply power off the fuel pump after a delay if the oil pressure goes away.


Note that in our fleet vehicles which are all GM V8's the computer will pull the spark if the oil pressure dips below a certain value. IIRC it is 6 psi.

I'm sure many other cars do the same.

 

[ZeeOSix]

If the dealership said the low oil pressure light was working, then how did they test it if the engine was seized up?

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: dnewton3
Next, you'd need to better define what functions you're speaking of. Are you talking about low oil level lights, or low oil pressure lights? There is a difference.


In either case, there should have been a warning light that came on. If the driver is unaware the light is on, or sees the light and ignores it, then it's not going to do any good - same as if the light never came on.

 

[threeputtpar]

Originally Posted By: Tink
Originally Posted By: threeputtpar

What I'm getting at is if you can point to the filter that fell off and say that the last place to change the oil didn't use that specific kind of filter at the time of the change, then you can deduct that they didn't change it and possibly did loosen it to change it but never removed it or tightened it back up.


The filter did not fall off, it was just loose and all of the oil evacuated under pressure from there.


Fell off or came loose, it doesn't matter as the results were, for all intents and purposes, identical.

Did the shop that you are now trying to sue do the oil change previous to the one in question? If they didn't (as in they performed the last oil change and another shop did the one before) and the filter that came loose and is in your possesion is different than what they would have been using at the time of the oil change in question, then you can surmise that they did not change the filter and may have tampered with it and that could be the root cause of the damages being sought.

Sorry to go leagalese on this, but clearly you were not understanding my original question. It gets a bit harder to prove any type of chain of custody if they had in fact done the last 2 oil changes. Only if they used different brands of filters between the most recent change and the immediately previous one can you state a case of them not changing it and possibly loosening or tampering with it, and then it would only be plausible if the filter was not the same as what they were using at the time of the most recent change.

As you can see, you're pretty much screwed because you don't have the concrete proof of what really happened. Short of having a video of them breaking the filter loose and then leaving it loose instead of changing it, you don't have a leg to stand on.