Best Diesel Engine Oil?

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While they all will do a a great job, one thing that seems to have come out of my over 5 million documented miles operating heavy commercial diesels, is that engines are like rifles.

You can take two well made .22 rifles and feed them the very same high quality ammunition, and many times, you will get different results on target. Change to another high quality ammunition brand, and the results may be reversed. Not that anything is wrong with either rifle or any of the ammunition brands, just that each rifle has a preference for a particular brand of ammo and delivers better results with that brand. One of those little mysteries of life.

Engines seem to mirror that with different brands of oil. While using any of them will not be a problem, there just seems to be that one brand or formulation that the motor just seems to prefer based on consumption rates and results on UOA's.
 
That is exactly correct, and represents some of the fundamental underlying info I try to instill into folks with my "normalcy" article.

In macro data analysis, you can look at mass market responses.

But if you want to know what is individually "best", then you have to do micro analysis; that takes HUGE amounts of time and money. For guys that run OTR and choose to absorb the extra expense of the testing, they can probably proclaim what is "best" for their rig, but there is ZERO assurance that same lube will be "best" for another rig.

However, it is VERY SAFE to presume that any lube meeting the recommended specifications (typically CJ-4 for some time now), will assure fine performance, regardless if it's "best" or not.

It's simply not worth the expense to find "best" in terms of real tangible micro data proof; we're talking about many hundreds of thousands of miles of testing. Using a qualified lube will return a very reasonable level of performance without the expense of that testing. Using any qualified lube may give you 98% of the results that the elusive "best" lube would give, but it may cost you 10% extra to run all the testing. The ROI is unobtainable in situations like this. And, given that lube formulations will change over time, any testing you did might be outdated before you could even reach a conclusion.


I just cringe when folks ask about what's "best", because it's darn near improbable for any one member here to "prove" that their personal selection is going to be "best" in their own situation, let alone for someone else.
 
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