Now on the Mobil website they seemingly recommend the ESP line for all applications that call for 5w30. I guess they think it's good for everything. They even listed as the "correct" oil for my 1997 Nissan Maxima......will it protect the Maxi engine better than other oils??
In a 1997, I'm sure you have pretty high miles, so the ESP 0/5W-30 would work well.
M1 ESP 0/5W-30 is a HTHS 3.5 oil that's formulated for higher-strung European engines that will supposedly be running at higher speeds on the Autobahn, so it's thicker than your standard API-SN 5W-30 oils, most of which are in the HTHS 3-3.2 range.
As has been discussed earlier in the thread, it has some very tough approvals from Euro OEMs. Much tougher than any US OEM approvals. So it's very good stuff.
The 0W-30 flavor, you can get on sale at Advance Auto Parts for $28/jug. I picked up a few jugs there to run in my Tacoma, which now has 246,000 miles. I had run vanilla M1 and M1-EP up to now. Interestingly, the 0W-30 is a bit thicker than the 5W-30.
Like someone else had said earlier in this thread, I believe it's M1's top of the line oil, and, despite the fact that there's no particular benefit to my old Tacoma, I just wanted to try M1's best oil. I plan to run it for 10,000 miles (should be close to 1 year at my usage) and get a UOA for the fun of it. I am interested to see if it reduces the slight oil consumption I'm experiencing in the Taco (approximately 0.5qt in 8000 miles).
EDIT: Well, that sucks. AAP has now excluded the ESP from the discount codes that used to work on it (ChrisFix25, 25JAN).
Anybody had success finding ESP on sale anywhere lately? I've heard of it going on sale at NAPA periodically, but I've personally never been able to catch any on sale there.
I was willing to buy ESP @ $28/jug, but it wouldn't make sense to buy it at regular price ($38.99/jug) for my applications, when I can get M1-EP on sale for like $12/jug with M1's yearly rebate.