Quote:
Originally Posted by m6pwr
What you've experienced is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would hope to shout that if you change the oil at 3k or 5k that your car engine will run like a gem. But it doesn't necessarily mean that changing the oil at mfr specified intervals is going to reduce the service life of the engine, or make it run less gem-like (whatever that means). If you have credible evidence that the latter is so, you'd be doing us all a great service by posting a link. Maybe send it to BMW AG as well. Their maintenance schedules are not prescribed by bean counters (a link for that?). They spend a pretty penny at several independent testing labs like this one developing their maintenance routines - - http://www.isp-testing.com/en/. And in the case of lube maintenance, it begins with BMW engine development engineers working as a team with their lubricant partner (Castrol in our case) and their tribologists and lube formulators. |
Well I wish I had solid proof, but sorry, I'm just a regular dude giving his opinion. I don't think that there is some conspiracy to prevent cars from running well beyond BMW's warranty coverage, but I do think that there is a lot more financial consideration that goes into how often they give away free service than some of us here seem to think.
Here is a link to Castrol recommending oil changes every 3K miles or 3 months. They give no alternative recommendation on synthetic oils so the ultimate impression that you get from this is those numbers are their standard no matter the oil type. Yes they do say that you should check with your auto makers recommendations (because it could vary
slightly).
http://www.castrol.com/castrol/gener...tentId=6004639
Mobil 1's take on the situation (you can easily search this) is that the intervals are anywhere between 3 and 15K. They state that on some newer cars you can feel safe running to a recommended 15k by the manufacturer. Read between the lines and I take that as... even though 15K miles is a lot to run on, you can feel safe when using our product because its so great. One thing I will say for sure is I don't read this and get the understanding that all quality synthetics perform best when used for 15K+ miles and if you change it too soon it's actually worse. These are people that make more money the more we have to buy oil.
One more, Toyota recommends 5K mile changes when using 5w-30 synthetic. Yes, it varies from car to car, but seriously what is going on inside a BMW engine that could be so different that all of a sudden synthetic oils perform better when you go over 10 thousand miles or whatever?
I think the bottom line is really how you drive. If your car never sees more than 3500 RPM's then yea maybe you can feel safer going to 10K. Anybody that has a car with some performance, and knows how to use it, not so much.