Originally Posted by js1956
Originally Posted by MaximaGuy
The whole European spec standards is a freaking nightmare and a hogwash - it's a stupiiid ICE that has been there for over a century why all these boutique soups.
The American standards are so simple backward compatible and just pure common sense.
Wonder what greatness is there in the Euro engines that other engine manufactures don't need. To me it is over-engineering & madness
I view all this madness as Pay for Play scheme. No different then ISO in manufacturing which I was part of close to 40 years and over half of those years in QA. It goes like this. Pay us one time fee ( in last place I worked before retiring) of $50K+ to be certified by folowing certain guidelines in your processes which are described in ISO standard (sort of like automakers requirements?) and then $10K or more for annual audit and this will guarantee extra sales to customers requiring that you're ISO certified.
Looks like no different with automakers collecting huge fees for letting oil co. put this or that approval on the bottle.
And here's catch 22.
Let's say you don't use their approved oil but some cheaper brand similar in performance, base stock, detergent and antiware additives and something happens with your engine, your warranty service will be denied regardless if it was fault of the oil or some mechanical failure not even oil related.
I don't know much about oil and all this approval process, what's involved and why.
The rant above is what I sort of suspect what is going on.
Approvals are actually very cheap. Though I think GM is in that pay for play game.
BMW, VW, MB approvals are around $4000.