I don’t get the need for a marketing claim. A BITOGer in particular should be pushing OCI only backed by UOA, not an empty marketing claim. The fact that Valvoline doesn’t give a mileage claim is to their credit, and absolutely should not be held against them.
And since you need to do the UOA anyway, why not just do that with VRP and find out what OCI it does for you?
M1 EP says “protects for 20,000 miles, guaranteed.” But what does that mean, actually? What does it mean to “protect”? Does it mean no engine failure? Well, we’ve seen enough crazy engines with 40k or 50k on them that have never had an oil change on factory fill and still have not failed. But do you want to be the 2nd owner of that engine?
What is the standard? If you run M1 EP for 20k miles and after 100k miles on five OCIs you have major oil consumption and deposits, but the engine still runs just fine, it that “protected”? M1 might think so. I might not. You might not.
Unless someone can prove that these mileage claims from someone like M1 for the EP line mean “engine is surgically clean and has zero consumption” then I’d encourage someone to think long and hard about what these mileage claims are actually guaranteeing.
There’s enough wiggle room in the language of these “guarantees” to ensure that basically every synthetic oil on the market would meet the same claim:
What’s “frequent” towing? How dusty is “extremely”? How much idling is “excessive”?
If someone can’t see how these loopholes only “guarantee” that M1 will never pay a claim, they are a sucker who has proved that marketing works.