OVERKILL
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For people who aren't keen on the idea of not having formal approvals or are more budget conscious, Dave at HPL recommends M1 FS 0W-40 a lot of the time, because they've tested the product internally and it's "too good" to be sold at the price Mobil sells it for; it's an absolute bargain for the performance you get. If you do some searching you'll find numerous cases of this.I understand you completely but why not get MB 229.5 approval to be on the list? I completely get it and I don't question this HPL oil at all. Heck, I never heard of it. What I am questioning is that on one hand folks are questioning "why would someone use this Amazon Basic Euro that is not approved while M1 Euro is approved and sitting on the shelf at Wally World at the same price" but yet folks on BITOG seem to have zero issues with paying 3x the cost for a non approved HPL oil while again M1 approved oil is sitting on the shelf at Wally World for 1/3 the cost. This is beyond me. Let me go grab that 1/2 case of Heineken in my fridge and maybe I will come to sense after finishing that.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, Warren and HPL are on different ends of the spectrum. Warren is blending for the lowest cost possible to meet the price targets set by Walmart, Amazon...etc, while HPL is blending for the highest performance possible with final cost playing a very minor role in dictating materials selection. As @BMWTurboDzl noted above, the only way Dave was able to get Dr. Rudnick onboard was to basically give him carte blanche on formulation. The "Godfather" of modern synthetic oil formulation, the man was retired and wasn't interested in pinching pennies to pad profits for somebody else. Giving him access to the best materials and saying "have at 'er!" was essentially what got him onboard. Basically, a very different type of involvement from when he worked for the majors.
They (HPL) DO start with formally approved additive packages. You can buy these from Lubrizol, Afton, Infineum (owned by Mobil and Shell)...etc. But then they:
- Use a blend of premium base oils that includes esters and AN's to provide cleaning.
- Use PAO for their 0W-xx formulations and Super Car product line.
- Use high quality VII's in the minimum amount required, leaning more on the base oil. This basically eliminates shear.
- Test the product extensively while using certain blends of additives they know are synergistic with the core additives, to improve overall performance. This fine tuning is done until the best results are attained and then the blend is considered optimal.
Their Super Car 0W-40 for example, doesn't have any more ZDDP than M1 0W-40 does. But, it has a lot more moly. They also use blends of different types of moly along with other FM chemistry (like tungsten) depending on the formulation (part of that fine-tuning I mentioned earlier) depending on what yields the best results for AW and friction reduction. This is expensive, but again, cost is a very minor factor in materials selection with their oils.
Does that help?
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