I haven't seen this talk - I think most cars get scrapped when the chassis rots, or the suspension goes, or the tech’s obsolete - not when the engine dies which is probably the last thing to go. So BEV should be no different?
The engine can be the last thing to go, if you are good about checking and changing your oil.
If you let the oil run low, or let it sludge up, or don't promptly detect a cooling system leak [1], that will damage the bearings, and then it is only a matter of time before it dies.
[1] Some engines can have the head gasket start to leak, which lets coolant into the combustion chamber (which is bad). Worse are the engine designs that integrate the water pump into the engine block. If the water pump leaks (which they often do, it drips coolant directly into the oil, which is super bad.
An external water pump, in contrast, will just leak on the outside of the engine onto the ground. In either case, the coolant will run low, and eventually the engine will overheat. However, in the external pump case, you can just fix the leaky pump, and assuming you didn't try to run it overheated, you're fine.
But with an internal water pump, by the time the coolant has run low, you've severely degraded the oil too, and likely damaged the bearings. In addition, replacing the internal pump usually means dropping the entire engine out of the vehicle, which is far more costly.
Thus endeth my rant on water pumps.
First - it is rusting a lot. Then the car door doesn't close properly when it is colder than -15 or -20. Then the car has decided that the esp is faulty 2 times on longer rides in cold weather and that the max speed should be 20kmh (luckily a restart of the car fixed that)
I don't think ive ever heard about people talking about changing their oil here in europe in actual day-to-day life, but I have heard much more about antifreeze or windscreen wiper fluid or even water/coolant.
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.
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).
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"!
(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...
Either 5 is justified by engineering or 20 is? One of them must be some kind of misrepresentation?
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.
My guess is the guidance is to avoid some PR nightmare.
Seems to me reading the thread that the difference is because US dealers use crappy oil so they specify more oil changes? Or maybe it's just greed.
If they followed anything like what we did, they would just run load cycles on the engine in a test cell to simulate approximately however many miles of ‘normal’ use they want to validate the engine up to. During the testing the engine would be maintained, fueled, and oiled according to the maintenance schedule and customer guidelines the engine will be sold with.
After the testing, the engine would be completely broken down and analyzed. If there weren’t any signs of abnormal wear then the engine would be considered validated __under those conditions__.
The problem is when real-world use deviates from the testing conditions. Which is pretty much always. Then the manufacturer guidelines no longer apply.
If you run your engine harder than the test cycle load factor, you will need to replace the engine oil more regularly. If your fuel quality is crap, i.e. has any ethanol in it, you will need to replace your oil more regularly as fuel eventually gets into the oil, and ethanol results in high water content in fuels, and hence oil, which will break down seals as well as reduce overall lubrication.
If your engine breaks down due to poor oil quality from lack of regular inspection and replacement, then as a manufacturer I’d be very resistant to paying out on any warranty claim. Even if you followed the “guidelines” for oil changes, you still have a duty to inspect the oil regularly, both as a responsible driver and under the car manual guidelines. Using bad oil and / or fuel is very easy to test for.
Long story short, the oil change intervals guidelines are just that, guidelines, and real-world use dictates the maintenance schedule. Frequent oil changes, before the oil breaks down / becomes crap, is just a quick, cheap way to prolong the life of your engine or any mechanical device with bearings or sliding surfaces for that matter.
No this isn’t true. I check my oil as regularly as the manual tells me to, which is every two years. That’s literally the published inspection schedule in the UK for this car. If that isn’t regular enough and the engine wears that’s a warranty issue covered by the manufacturer.
Waiting two years before realizing your engine is drinking oil is probably reckless which wouldn’t be covered under any warranty.
That is real-world use in most of Europe and is included in the higher mileage between oil changes compared to the US discussed here. I don't even think most Europeans inside the EU have access to ethanol free petrol? At least around here (Denmark) it would be illegal. If a car breaks down because of ethanol in the petrol it is of course covered by the manufacturer. Otherwise they might as well state "warranty 5 years but not if petrol has been added at any point".
The manufacturer specified intervals are just fine and you'd need to be an extreme outlier to have any problems with your oil following them. Maybe if you have a caravan attached at all times or drive off-road or racing or all of the above at the same time. Otherwise consumer law would mandate the manufacturer pay for any damages caused, as it damn well should. It is also the manufacturer that would have to prove the fault is yours. Not possible if the car have been serviced even if done by a third-party shop. The oil would have to be visible damaged even if looked at by a granny (they cannot demand you understand oil better than "it looks like oil and is inside the specified mileage").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So mostly it is pandering to old people, but it is still an expression
Some things about it stand out in memory. Engines were so big and un-compacted back then it was relatively easy to fit your hands and tools where ever they needed to go and pieces of the engine basically looked like what you’d expect them to be.
The other thing I found out later was that my father was desperate to sell me the car, because it allowed him to get me off his insurance. I was a 17 year old boy, with one fender bender already under my belt and my parents had just bought a new Mercedes sedan. For insurance purposes, as a licensed driver living with them, without my own car the insurance company considered me a driver of the new car and the insurance was outrageous. After my dad sold me the car, I was off their main policy and on a separate one. Very tricky dad.
> Some engines can have the head gasket start to leak
Rust is much less of a problem for anything manufactured this century. Suspension is pretty cheap to fix, it cost me <$2000 to get my entire front suspension replaced a while back.
I'm guessing you don't have below freezing temperatures, and roads sprinkled with salt every winter? That's the real suspension and car chassis killer.
I've also heard that it's similar near seas (or oceans), where non negligible amounts of salt from the sea are present as aerosol in the air.
No such thing drives similar changes for other components. I drove a 2003 Honda Pilot 265k miles and get rid of it in 2019. It needed shocks, brakes and would have needed the exhaust system replaced soon due to rust. Just wasn’t worth the money.
I sold it to a guy I know for $2000, he drove it until last year, removed the engine and transmission, and sold it.
Don't know what is the current status. Audi started dipping the bodies in zinc since 1987. So technologies exist.
Fancy way to say galvanised?
> Toyota is famous for extreme durability in functional parts like engine or electronics. But also infamous, how the chassis rots away very fast.