Originally Posted By: barryh
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Lots of people here change their oil at 5k instead of waiting for the recommended 10k.
Yes I'm also changing the oil at 5K which seems wasteful but may be cheap insurance. It's interesting that when I read about cam chain failures the car always seems to have a full Mercedes service history which would be anything up to 15K intervals.
It may just be a design defect and have nothing to do with the oil. On the 2006-2007 E-350's here, the balance shafts would fail, but that part was updated and had nothing to do with what oil was run. Here the service interval is now every 10k or one year, used to be 13k but I guess people don't like to run their oil that long when they used to change it every 3k on conventional. My E-350 uses 8.5 quarts so the oil isn't really used up even at 10k. Still, I end up changing it around 8-9k but occasionally let it go to almost 10k when I can't get around to it. I just have too much $2/quart oil from Autozone so I'm doing slightly more frequent oil changes.