Do us a favor and run the oil and when you are driving at highway speed check the oil temp and engine temp. The reason I ask is you should see a significant drop in both fully warmed up operating temperatures. It would be interesting to see just how much cooler the car runs with synthetic over dino oil. That has always been the premise for GM using it and when they went to the LS1 engine they dropped the oil cooler and specified Mobile 1 because the engine would run within the range they needed to pass emissions. I have heard it will reduce the running temperatures by as much as 30 degrees. You may be able to shed some light on this theory. Oh and synthetic oil will safely run far longer then regular oil before needing changed.
As long as I am on the subject Here are some thoughts I have had recently on oil changes
How to reduce our dependency on foreign oil
Today we have motor oils that are rated for 5, 10, or 15 thousand miles of use before being changed. However because great grandpa advocated changing his oil every 3 thousand miles it became the national standard (remember this was in the days before synthetic or blended oils). And also the manufactures recommended we change the oil this frequently (again because of less effective filtering and short trip driving). Now we fast forward to today’s real world were the engines go 250K instead of 50K as in the days of old.
So let’s try to put this in perspective as to how it impacts our dependency on foreign oil.
If you drive a car 100,000 miles and change the oil every 3,000 miles that will take 33 oil changes. But if you only change every 6,000 miles you only have 16.6 oil changes. Each oil change will take 4 quarts of oil so you have used 33 gallons of oil at 3,000 mile change intervals as opposed to 16.6 gallons at 6,000 miles.
If 1,000,000.00 people every day change their oil at 3,000 miles instead of 6,000 we will be prematurely disposing of 16,600,000.00 gallons of oil a day (Adding to our environment problems). Carrying this further take the daily figure and multiply by 365 days a year and you get 6,059,000,000.00 gallons of oil that has been wasted.
I believe that we out of a lack of knowledge want to cling to the way we have always done it approach. For example I remember when radial tires became the new kid in town people actually bought new cars and then took them directly to a tire store to replace the radials. Or when disk brakes were first introduced the horror stories that were told about how you would have to replace everything but the crank for the passengers window when the brakes needed to be replaced. Or more recently the acceptance of seat belts, air bags, anti lock brakes. So until proven wrong I for one will accept that what I learned as a teenager from grandpa and dad has been improved with technology and the old truisms no longer apply. I will however keep an open mind and if my car goes through a sand storm I would then off course replace the filters and oil regardless of the mileage on them.
