5 ms·

Something that is extremely anecdotal experience for me, especially given I have never owned a car, is that things like "check your oil" are weirdly a feature m

• chrisseaton 5y ago
  I looked up the oil change schedule for my car once. Same car and specs available in both the US and the UK (minor compliance issues like colour of indicators beside.) In the UK the manufacturer recommends changing every 20,000 miles or two years, in the US every 5,000 miles or six months. Same car! I have never changed my oil in my car, despite having it over a year, and won't look to do it for another year yet. I think that would give most Americans a heart attack. They've got an entire industry over there changing oil 4x more frequently than actually required. Absolutely bizarre.
  • bryanlarsen 5y ago
    I presume that the UK schedule specifies synthetic oil, that does let the oil last a little bit longer. But not that massive difference. One of the reasons people give for buying German luxury cars is because they only need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • zepearl 5y ago
      > One of the reasons people give for buying German luxury cars is because they only need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars. No clue about American & Japanese cars, but for VW (and Opel) it's definitely just once per year (in Switzerland).
    • logifail 5y ago
      > need the oil changed once a year vs the 3-4x a year for American or Japanese or Volkswagen cars We bought a VW Polo, kept it for ten years, then changed it for a VW Sharan, and recently added a VW Up. Total miles driven must be around 200k. Based on a sekrit strategy - called reading then following the service manual - can confirm that (at least our) Volkswagens do not need their oil changing "3-4x a year"!
      • bryanlarsen 5y ago
        Are you in North America? The OP said that North America and Europe had very different oil change schedules. I haven't owned a Volkswagen for 30 years, so I guess it isn't surprising if it has changed.
        • frosted-flakes 5y ago
          Nope, American/Canadian manuals for VW cars tend to specify 16000 km or 10000 miles. I have experience with mk4 and mk5 VWs (diesel and gas) and they all had similar or the same oil change interval.
          • logifail 5y ago
            https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/owners-and-drivers/servicing/service-plans/service-schedules.html https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/owners-and-drivers/servicing... (assuming you're not doing significantly more than 10,000 miles per year) "For the first three years of ownership, your car will require an annual service inspection and oil service." This seems to be the recommendation for US/Canada too...
    • scheme271 5y ago
      This isn't true. The VW service manuals for at least the last 15 years have had a 10k mile service interval for changing the oil and not 3-4X a year.
      • teamonkey 5y ago
        The plan I had with my VAG garage was a service once every 2 years. No need to change the oil more often than that unless I were to do a lot of miles.
    • burntoutfire 5y ago
      I have a Japanese car (Mitsubishi), made in Japan and imported to Poland, sold with a manual in Polish. The manual says to change oil every year or 20kkm, whichever comes first.
      • bryanlarsen 5y ago
        And if it was sold in North America it would say something very different in the manual.
  • aronpye 5y ago
    An oil change is cheap. It’s also far better to preventatively change the oil, that way the engine is running with optimum lubrication most of the time. If you wait to change the oil when it’s black sludge, it’s likely damage will slowly build up from allowing the engine to run with poor oil.
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      So why don’t the manufacturer recommend it? Especially since it’s comprehensively warrantied for seven years so entirely their problem? Either 5 is justified by engineering or 20 is? One of them must be some kind of misrepresentation?
      • throwawayboise 5y ago
        Maybe the oil sold in Europe is more uniformly higher grade? If I go to the local auto parts store here, I can spend ~$1.00/qt for oil or more than $10.00/qt for oil. Guess which oil most people will buy? Also I don't really have any confidence that the dealers are using factory specified oil. I think they probably use the cheapest bulk oil they can buy. That's why I change my own oil, that way I know what is in the engine.
        • chrisseaton 5y ago
          A counterpoint to this is that my car is manufactured in a single plant in Europe. It ships with engine oil in it (because it's driven on and off the transport ship). So I presume one sold in the UK and the US have the same oil in, yet Land Rover will tell you to change that exact same oil in the exact same engine after 20k miles in the UK and 5k miles in the US.
          • Spooky23 5y ago
            There’s a weird subset of Americans who are very “passionate” about motor oil. They argue about oil filters and formulations… almost audiophile like. My guess is the guidance is to avoid some PR nightmare.
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    Newer cars will usually tell you. Iirc, it averages around 8-11k miles or 4-5 months for my Honda. It’s a weird topic that people get religious about. I will say that in the 90s when I changed it myself, the viscosity of the oil was very different if you went longer between changes.
  • jcrawfordor 5y ago
    Is this possibly related to E10? E10 is the norm in the US but, as I understand it, E5 is more common in Europe. I don't know the chemistry but I do know that there are concerns about ethanol adversely affecting the life of engine seals, moreso in older vehicles not designed for it, but there's at least a fringe of people who insist it's an issue for modern engines as well. I also know that there are some appreciable differences between EU and US standards for diesel (higher cetane number in Europe) which adversely impacts the performance of small diesel engines in the US, but I don't know if there are any similar issues with gasoline. I'd also be curious about the manufacturer's specified oil. It is surprisingly common for new vehicles in the US to still specify conventional or blended oil, where 5k miles is a more common change interval. I've seen as high as 15k mile change interval specified in the manual for a US vehicle but the manual also specified full synthetic only (this was a turbocharged engine which tends to adversely impact life, I wonder if a similar naturally aspirated may have listed 20k). In any case the "change oil every 3k miles" guideline is long gone in the US, with 5k-14k being more common, but nonetheless 3k was common for long enough that it seems to be thoroughly instilled into the minds of many members of the baby boomer generation. I think this has given a certain license to the chain lube shops, long a source of suspect business practices, to continue to use 3k miles for their window stickers. That said I've seen even Jiffy Lube put in a window sticker for 7k miles, for a blended oil. There's a story (I don't know if it's true) that the 3k mile recommendation stuck around for so long only because the domestic automakers were uninterested in going to the expense of longer testing, and that situation changed due to both media involvement (Consumer Reports for example took this on as a big issue in the '90s) and competition from the Japanese automakers that had invested more money into research. 5k actually seems unusually low for a new production vehicle and I would tend to think that must have been specified for conventional or at least blended. Outside of some older engines with detergent-related concerns pretty much the only thing keeping conventional oil on the market is price and more and more vehicles are specifying synthetic only. Finally, temperatures across the UK are much more moderate than across the US. While synthetic oils have less issues this way, oil behavior in terms of actual viscosity and lubricity tends to vary appreciably by temperature, and worst of all mostly when it matters most right after startup. This has an adverse impact on both oil and engine life. It's become less common for US vehicles to specify different oil grades for different seasons/temperature ranges (although some still do), but US maintenance guidelines are still going to be developed for a pretty wide temperature range that notably includes ambient temperatures in the 80-100F/26-37C range that significantly thin oil and are uncommon in the UK. A similar problem exists at the low end, in parts of the US cold start temperatures of 20F/-7C are routine and most vehicle manuals no longer call for block heat until you get down to nearly 0F. Oil can take a long time to "limber" starting from these low temperatures and that's hard on engine life and puts a lot of metal shavings in the oil. Manufacturers kind of have to set their maintenance recommendations at "lowest common denominator" since practical experience with seasonal/climate-based oil recommendations have shown that vehicle owners and maintenance shops are both extremely bad at following them.
  • moistly 5y ago
    I would expect the schedule for the first $X months/$Y km to differ from subsequent periods. Manufacturing tolerances are incredible these days but there is still going to be a period of high wear leading to less and less new particulate in the fluids. At some early point, months if not weeks or days after the mechanical bits all have experienced a range of conditions, a fluids change would be beneficial. Most of the wear having taken place, it will take much more time to reach the same level of contamination after the first fluids change. Does your owner’s manual recommend abiding by certain speed/rpm limits during a break-in period? I’m pretty sure my (Canadian) old car/old truck do.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  If your car is newish (under 8 years and under 100K miles), you can pretty safely ignore any routine oil checking and just change it every year or ~12K miles. At some oil change, the mechanic will tell you [or you will see] that you have an oil leak or consumption issue and should then start checking it more often. A newer car will use way under a half-quart of oil in 10K miles, which can be ignored entirely. I change the oil on our CR-V every year (about 5-6K miles) and because it’s 17 years and 225K miles old it uses some oil, which I top up twice between annual changes. The amount of oil changing done in the US is indeed excessive and driven by promoting the practice to consumers who, in general, couldn’t find their oil filter nor explain the function of oil and oil filtration, and can only judge based on what everyone is doing and whether they can afford it. The little reminder stickers to bring your car back in 3K (yes!) miles are a critical business supply for an oil change franchise.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    In the 1980s, with conventional motor oil, 3k mile changes made sense. It was cheap insurance. With engines made today and synthetic oil, 10k mile intervals are not unusual. The quick-lube places will still put 3k miles on their reminder sticker, because it's more business for them. Also be sure they are actually using the correct synthetic oil for your car, and not conventional 10w40 that would be appropriate for a 1978 Chevy.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      The advent of closed-loop fuel control has helped oil service life as well, but I think the “it’s cheap insurance” psychology is a message that makes sense to primitive human brains well beyond the underlying engineering data, leading us to over-service expensive things.
  • ansible 5y ago
    > ... you can pretty safely ignore any routine oil checking and just change it every year... No, no, no, no, no. Stretch the oil change intervals a little if you have to, but you need to check the oil on a regular basis. The oil level and quality are critical to the life of the engine. By the time the oil pressure warning light comes on, you may already have irreparable damage to the main bearings.
• bluGill 5y ago
  In the 1970s and before getting 100,000 miles on a car was a big deal, you would call all your friends for that, put oil in the engine, drive off in a cloud of blue smoke and 10 minutes latter having crossed that mark return and put more oil in. In the 1980s cars got a lot more reliable and so most don't remember how bad they used to be. Few cars, even old worn out beaters need their oil checked between changes, but it used to be a big deal and not doing it's would destroy your engine fast since it would run out. So mostly it is pandering to old people, but it is still an expression