The Fallacy (fallacies?) behind "It's cheap insurance"

[IndyIan]

Are there actually "bad" oils available to buy on store shelves (in the US) ?

Depends on your vehicle. For my Focus, almost any oil is good oil. Its a proven KISS port FI NA engine with no bad design decisions, or poor parts suppliers, and it lives the ideal life spending most of its time at ~2400 rpm, ~55mph for ~30 minutes at a time with the engine at 200f...
These can and do go well over 300k miles with iffy-lube conventional 5W20 every 5k, and white box filters, with the odd forgotten oil change.... For the last couple years I'm doing ~12-14k mile OCI's, as its quite clear the engine is going to outlast the body by a long long margin! I need to add a litre in the middle somewhere to get to the end on the low mark, and it gets whatever is handy, 15W40 last week so I could empty the pail.

Iffy-lube, cheapest supplier they could find bulk 5W20, probably isn't going to work in something with the lightest possible tension rings, or more complicated with DI and turbos, and 17' of timing chains and VVT hardware, running much hotter or colder(if you short trip), with potential dilution issues or LSPI, and a 10k OCI.... Almost anything new these days is nearly as complicated as a 2000's Audi S performance engine, but made on a tighter budget, and not built by Hans in Ingolstadt. So oil that meets the specs or better is "cheap insurance" for almost everything now.

 

[gfh77665]

In 2006 wanting to give my young family a really nice vehicle to grow up in, I bought a Honda Odyssey. Since I stretched a bit to buy it, I decided to give it the very best PM and care I possibly could, wanting it to "last forever". I over maintained it by a significant margin and babied it when I drove it.

Then, it unceremoniously flooded out in my driveway and was totaled out by hurricane Harvey. I could have easily got by with half the maintenance and expense. Now I try to hit the sweet spot, enough to never really miss anything, but never too much either. Lesson learned.

 

[Zee09]

Also skips the fact that oil filters have not gotten any better either. If anything there worse.

 

[PandaBear]

Everything has a diminishing return after a certain point. Sales people tend to push pash that all the time:

1) This $8k mattress is just a few dollars a day, cheaper than chiropractor.
2) This gym membership is $300 a month, still cheaper than a side salad in the restaurant every day.
3) This audio upgrade package in this new car is only $3k, cheaper than spotify subscription over 3 years.

You know how this goes, they are always trying to compare apple sauced with free labor to smoothies instead of apple to apple. Once you have one comparison in your head you won't compare to another and they dodge the bullet.

I may change oil more often than factory recommendation if it is a known problematic engine for oil issue, but not if they have no such problem.

 

[buster]

I use that term in a very general sense, not to be taken literally. Peace of mind and cheap insurance means not worrying about the very small, incremental difference between a lower quality oil vs high quality and what you gain. The peace of mind part comes from knowing if I have to go a few months before I can get to an oil change, I spent the extra money so that oil can cover that gap if need be. To me even the most expense oils changed 2x a year isn't a big expense. So it also depends on what exactly these terms are in reference to.

On the other hand, you have those that spend thousands on their cars, but then want to cut cost/corners on a commodity product that is already inexpensive to begin with.

 

[rstcso]

So I'd ask we stop using this garbage logic of "its cheap insurance" because that's just terrible thinking. Or if not, just know I'm secretly judging you for using it LOL.

All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.

Judgement Day is here!

 

[Hohn]

All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy... because it's cheap insurance.

Judgement Day is here!

I think my sciatica is flaring up. And my lawn needs protecting from people walking on it.

 

[ChrisD46]

Until technology advances to the point to allow installation of various visual monitoring and measurement sensors in various places inside an internal engine - we won’t really know what an ideal OCI really is ? Currently it’s still a bit of an educated guess . An engine can exhibit being free from sludge and varnish yet have clogged / carboned up oil control rings that can’t be seen (without an engine tear down) resulting in much lower engine life . Until technology can provide the detail BITOG members thirst for its down to using VRP for up to a 4K to 5K mile OCI and hope for the best .

 

[mark pruett]

I'd ask we stop using this garbage logic of "its cheap insurance" because that's just terrible thinking. Or if not, just know I'm secretly judging you for using it LOL.

I wholeheartedly agree. There are reasons we have owners manuals and standards.

Anything else is just second guessing those things in some kind of arrogant belief that we know better, and it's justified be being "cheap insurance" or "better safe than sorry".

I think it gives some people an element of "control" that they desperately crave when their vehicles are expensive. They're the same people who describe them as investments, which is incorrect 99.999% (or maybe even more 9s to the right of the decimal) of the time.

 

[SiRDOHC]

Until technology advances to the point to allow installation of various visual monitoring and measurement sensors in various places inside an internal engine - we won’t really know what an ideal OCI really is ? Currently it’s still a bit of an educated guess . An engine can exhibit being free from sludge and varnish yet have clogged / carboned up oil control rings that can’t be seen (without an engine tear down) resulting in much lower engine life . Until technology can provide the detail BITOG members thirst for its down to using VRP for up to a 4K to 5K mile OCI and hope for the best .

That's just it. We don't really know what is happening with the piston rings until we tear the bottom end apart or until we start to see oil consumption and compression loss.

If anything, oils like VRP can help shed some light on selecting the right OCI / oil for your application without teardown. Let's say you have an older but well maintained by the (book 5K ish oil changes), do a baseline UOA, compression test, filter inspection,. Run some VRP and do another compression test and UOA and filter inspection to see what changes if anything. If the results are alarming. maybe some tweaking is in order.

I have had engines that have uniformly lost compression across all cylinders and became oil burners over time, they could have maybe benefitted from one or all of the above tweaks.

As mentioned above the prospect of a possible insurance write off is the only thing that throws your efforts and $ down the drain if you don't mind being the one to drive it till it's end. So is it cheap insurance? No such thing as mentioned, but taking exceptional care of things does fall under a hobby, this one is not very expensive compared to others. Why can't we just accept that everyone's take is going to be different here? Someone who waxes their vehicle a couple times a year could be said to be wasting their time too, because cars don't need good paint to operate and could be totaled before the clearcoat would fail were you to not wax it.

I have been guilty of erring on the side of caution with earlier oil changes, mostly to avoid mid winter oil changes, but also because of past experiences with not quite knowing the point at which rings start to seize up.

 

[4WD]

This feels like a “when you can snatch the pebble” thread …

 

[mr_boring]

Only VRP

Every time I open this site I hear the echoes from the past still bouncing off of the mountains "It's alllll maarrkketttiiinnnggggg ggg gg g"

 

[ATex7239]

How about this as an example. My toyota says 10K OCI. Then it says if you fall into these use cases its now 5K intervals. Are we to assume these use cases are the only ones? What other sets of conditions might emulate this. For example, it says "heavy vehicle loading" but gives no specifics. What is heavy loading? 1/2 rated load. 80%?

I think one can infer that there are lots of use cases where Toyota themselves think 5K is better, and then the owner is left to try to figure out where the line is. So might be just as easy to go with 5K.

Like this whole thread - its nebulous.

View attachment 295972

I would call this (going off the serve sch due to the lack of detail) using an abundance of caution vs the it’s cheap insurance which is usually just another way of saying I’m set my ways and don’t want to change.

 

[Plumb Bob]

Do we have an actuary on the forum?

 

[mr_boring]

Do we have an actuary on the forum?

Well, actuary I'm an exshpert.

 

[440_Magnum]

But then we see an engineer change something small, that turns out to be big, causing unpredicted shortening of an engine's life. Sludging. Whatever's going on with GM's 6.2.

Gotta have a nitpick with that last one… no engineer made the change that hurt all those 6.2s. A final preparation step wasn’t applied to crankshafts… that’s an assembly plant process error. Was it done deliberately to save money? No idea, but if so that was a bean-counter error. Engineers make plenty of mistakes, but left to their own devices they catch those mistakes in testing more often than not. While a good engineer will choose the less expensive or quicker of two otherwise equal options, they will rarely make design or process changes JUST to save time or money, those requirements are usually imposed by non-engineers.

 

[Hall]

Technically yes. If you were to use Supertech in a turbocharged vehicle that calls for a more stringent approval then it is a bad oil for that application

No, that's a user error or misapplication.

 

[Leo99]

Do we have an actuary on the forum?

I sat for the initial exams but didn't pass them.

 

[4WD]

Gotta have a nitpick with that last one… no engineer made the change that hurt all those 6.2s. A final preparation step wasn’t applied to crankshafts… that’s an assembly plant process error. Was it done deliberately to save money? No idea, but if so that was a bean-counter error. Engineers make plenty of mistakes, but left to their own devices they catch those mistakes in testing more often than not. While a good engineer will choose the less expensive or quicker of two otherwise equal options, they will rarely make design or process changes JUST to save time or money, those requirements are usually imposed by non-engineers.

Yep - They still run 0W20 when the parts are correct

 

[KrisZ]

"Cheap insurance" argument is nothing really. From a holistic point of view a bit of over maintenance, meaning doing things sooner than recommended by the manufacturer, is simply staying safe side. Nothing wrong with that since manufacturers are stretching the maintenance intervals to artificially lower the maintenance costs.

The fallacy of BITOG is "engineers know best" when it comes to oil viscosity, but when it comes to OCI "I'll do what makes me feel good".

And there are many more examples where people pick and choose which recommendations to follow vs which ones to ignore, a lot of times citing the engineers when they think it suits them, and totally ignoring that argument when it doesn't.