With all the anal chat on here about how often to change your oil. I have to say that in England and Europe oil changes are factory recomended at above 12,000 miles or so I have heard .Now maybe their oils are of a better quality than ours here or could it be that the auto companies are in cahoots with the oil companies here to fleece the NA motorists of money regarding oil changes?
Mechanics like it when you change oil more often. More opportunities to sell services as well as more opportunities to help make sure the car is operating properly and fix things before they become they dangerous. And for dishonest mechanics, more opportunities to take advantage of you.
The oils are most likely equivalent, although the standards from the European oil industry are different (but similar) to those from the American Petroleum Institute. Often, oils are made for both markets and meet both sets of standards.
Jeff
In Europe they have more stringent specs, generally speaking, for their oil. And for the most part the automakers over there write the specs rather then an "industry committee", which is how its done over here. There oil costs more but it's offset by the longer change intervals. The US standard 3000 mile change is wasteful and unnecessarily conservative. If you use a product like Mobile one you can easily run 12,000 miles or 12 months.
true.
But all oil products cost more over there... so it may not be related to the specs.
I agree that 300 is short. Interestingly, many foreign manufacturers who have long change intervals in Europe spec similar intervals in the USA, even when using US spec oils (Saab, BMW, etc).
I don't know that I'd run Mobil-1 12K miles without doing oil analysis along the way for that specific car... but you can certainly exceed 3K by a long way. Might want to check out
I don't think they actually spec the US oil, they just accept that some people will use it. BMW, and possibly some of the others, includes "free" maintenance for the first several years so that you'll bring the car back to them so they can put the right oil in it.
Been doing it for several years in all my vehicles and no problems. Doing an oil analysis is a waste of money. For the cost of the oil analysis you can just go ahead and change the oil. There was another guy who was running a home-grown long term oil change test with regular oil, mobile one, and amsoil and was not seeing any particular problems with roughly 12K length. He was having an oil analysis done at regular intervals to track the changes in the oil. One thing that seemed apparent was that with a long interval simply adding a quart of new oil made a major difference in the results of the analysis to the point where one might, if one was a gambling individual, be able to run a car for a long long time simply by changing the filter and adding a quart every 5000 miles and letting it go at that, plus any make up oil. In his case he only added the quart when the level dropped and he needed to add it to bring it back up to full.
The service is not free. It is part of the purchase price.
There is a system like this for big trucks where the engine oil is slowly pumped into the diesel tanks (at a rate of like 1 quart per 1000 miles - enough so that in maybe 15,000 miles, the entire volume of oil is replaced, and the oil is continuously replenished to keep the oil level good). Only the filter has to be changed and the clean oil reservoir that is used to keep the oil level good refilled. No need to change the oil, ever.
In theory, your scheme of changing only the filter and topping off the filter should work.
Jeff
Well, in the last few years they've move to synthetic or part synthetic... but previously they just spec'ed the upper level US oils with 5K severe/10K standard changes. They did not do oil changes for you until very recently.
Yeah, well "modeling" is OK... personally, I'd want to see someone with the same engine having run some tests.
For the cost of an oil change vs. the potential of engine wear, I personally would not take the risk.
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