Originally Posted By: WyrTwister
Oil / filter is cheap insurance when you compare it to the cost of an engine / car . The more frequent you change it , the more / better the insurance ( with in reason ) .
How much insurance do you feel you need ?
I am old school . Change oil / filter on our little red Chevy Sonic at 55% & 5% on the Oil Life Monitor . Changing it too often ? Probably , but DIY , I get a synthetic oil / DEXOS & filter change for under $ 30 .
As I said , cheap insurance .
Best of luck to all of you ,
I agree.
The oil life monitors used today are using different parameters across the manufacturers. In the U.S., almost any decision made in the corporate world is heavily (almost completely)influenced by liability. TPMS are in cars because they are required by law. However, it also lets a manufacturer off the hook. This would also apply to OLM's. Do they provide a useful function? Maybe. However, in the end, it is just an easy way for the manufacturer to say, "Your engine blew up because you went 25,000 miles past 0%". And believe, there are lots of people running around ignoring the OLM, just as they ignore the TPMS, Check Engine, and everything else. The OLM is really just a version of the lowest common denominator.
I always hear and read one here and other forums about how the manufacturer knows best. Really. With the incredibly ever-increasingly stringent emissions and mileage standards imposed in a relatively very short time period, many manufacturers are hustling JUST to keep everything together. This isn't just in the automotive world, it also applies to the commercial and industrial world. Durability, in MANY applications, has dropped significantly from 10-12-15 years ago.
It is your call how often you change oil. I think most people on this board realize more frequent oil changes could be a "waste" of money. That's all it is, if that. So the [censored] what.
Instead of spending(wasting)money on 10 UOA's in 50,000 miles to see how long you can stretch your OCI, why don't you take that money and just change your oil?
While on my rant
, this commonly repeated statement that fuel dilution and viscosity being out of grade is "normal" is [censored]. It may regularly happen on DI or GTDI engines now, but it is not "normal" by any means. These little automotive engines don't have huge sump capacities that would allow for things to be out of spec for very long.
Just because you do UOA's on YOUR engine, and you THINK your wear levels are okay, doesn't translate as that being okay in someone else's engine/driving situation.
I have done multiple UOA's on our two new Ford 2.7's, and I am actually kind of stunned(and I shouldn't be) about how much the oil gets degraded over a short amount of miles. Coming from a 2014 Edge 3.5 and 2013 F-150 5.0, which were "old school" injected engines, I haven't seen automotive oil samples like this for a long time. From what I have read, this is very common on GTDI and DI engines. We will probably never have access to any of the manufacturer's data on what is going on(see "liability" above), but the easy (and really only) way to MITIGATE any of this is to change my oil.
If you want to feel green, if you change your oil more often, you are increasing the quality of the base stock in re-cycled oil!
