Dealer service said synthetic oil will cause my 2003 Subaru to leak.

If one watches the YouTubes about them, we see it’s no different than in an office. They control dollars that techs earn, knowing little to if anything about cars.
I know exactly about this. I used to work summer jobs at a couple of dealership service dept. as a shag boy in high school. The mechanics would bemoan the warranty work and call the non warranty work “gravy”. They would go up to the service writer and either ask for more “gravy” or complain they weren’t getting enough gravy. One thing I will say, they tended to do better work on the “gravy” repairs than on the warranty repairs.
 
I did go ahead and do the oil change myself with the help of my neighbor and I put in Pennzoil Platinum full synthetic high mileage 5w30 (even though my 03 Subaru only has 46k miles.) This was about a month ago and so far no leaks.

My 08 Element had all of its oil changes at the dealer’s quick lube station, every 5k with 5w20 synthetic blend. Once it was out of the dealer’s 10 year, 100k powertrain warranty (as long as you did oil changes with them). I switched to Pennzoil Ultra Platinum at around 105k miles and have stayed with full synthetic switching around from Pennz to Mobile One and back with no leaks and my Element now has 150k miles.
Nice job man. Stay away from dealers, sham extortion rings is all they are. To make your change even easier, throw a fumoto valve on that beast!
 
Nice job man. Stay away from dealers, sham extortion rings is all they are. To make your change even easier, throw a fumoto valve on that beast!
I did get an extractor which works well with my other 2 cars since the filters are reachable from the top of the engine. I used it to extract the oil from the Subaru but you still have to go under for the filter (which my neighbor did for me.) While he was under there we decided for him to pull the plug to see how much oil was left after extracting it and about half a quart drained out. So not perfect but maybe I need to move the extractor hose around a little more.
 
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