Terry and Brian, I hope you don't mind if I jump into your loop to try and filter the oil in your system here.
To wit:
Is it even possible to determine, in a general-purpose "for all gas car engines" sense, the overall wear prevention characteristics of any one, particular oil, or the overall superiority/inferiority of various oils relative to each other, simply by comparing profligate UOAs of a variety of oils on a variety of engines under a variety of OCIs and otherwise generally uncontrolled conditions, such as posted on this site?
To put this another way, can we even tell from the UOAs on this site, in any meaningful, empirical sense, whether Brand X oil is universally and inherently better or worse than Brand Y oil "for all gas car engines"?
I think there may be a bell-curve distribution involved, so we might rather easily identify certain cheap oils which perform abysmally in most cases and certain expensive oils which perform great in most cases, but with the majority of oils falling anywhere between cheap/awful and spendy/great, objective and comparative evaluation may be more difficult.
Sure, one can simply spend $8/qt. to get the pricey stuff and be nearly assured that it will do its job quite well, but can we definitively determine -- from the UOAs as posted and compared here, remember -- whether any particular $2/qt. oil from the middle of the bell curve would likely do the job nearly or just as good as the $8 oil, or that one $2 oil is better than a competing $2 oil, again "for all gas car engines"?
In this sense, the teeming hordes of Mobil 1 and AMSOil UOAs posted here aren't doing us much good. Yes, those premium oils work well in many-to-most engines, and the UOAs tend to bear that out, but of course, we knew that already and really didn't need a bunch of UOAs to tell us that (tho' the reassurance is at least nice). Such a premium-heavy collection of random UOAs doesn't help us figure out if we can expect similar or acceptable results with competing, cheaper oils, and if so which one. A series of UOAs on our very own engines may help tell us which cheaper oils are better or worse for, or how long we can stretch an OCI on, each of those particular engines; however, can enough of those UOAs help us determine the same things about those oils not in any particular engine or engine family, but in any engine generally -- say, for someone whose engine type has never been UOA'd here?
-Tye
Is it even possible to determine, in a general-purpose "for all gas car engines" sense, the overall wear prevention characteristics of any one, particular oil, or the overall superiority/inferiority of various oils relative to each other, simply by comparing profligate UOAs of a variety of oils on a variety of engines under a variety of OCIs and otherwise generally uncontrolled conditions, such as posted on this site?
To put this another way, can we even tell from the UOAs on this site, in any meaningful, empirical sense, whether Brand X oil is universally and inherently better or worse than Brand Y oil "for all gas car engines"?
I think there may be a bell-curve distribution involved, so we might rather easily identify certain cheap oils which perform abysmally in most cases and certain expensive oils which perform great in most cases, but with the majority of oils falling anywhere between cheap/awful and spendy/great, objective and comparative evaluation may be more difficult.
Sure, one can simply spend $8/qt. to get the pricey stuff and be nearly assured that it will do its job quite well, but can we definitively determine -- from the UOAs as posted and compared here, remember -- whether any particular $2/qt. oil from the middle of the bell curve would likely do the job nearly or just as good as the $8 oil, or that one $2 oil is better than a competing $2 oil, again "for all gas car engines"?
In this sense, the teeming hordes of Mobil 1 and AMSOil UOAs posted here aren't doing us much good. Yes, those premium oils work well in many-to-most engines, and the UOAs tend to bear that out, but of course, we knew that already and really didn't need a bunch of UOAs to tell us that (tho' the reassurance is at least nice). Such a premium-heavy collection of random UOAs doesn't help us figure out if we can expect similar or acceptable results with competing, cheaper oils, and if so which one. A series of UOAs on our very own engines may help tell us which cheaper oils are better or worse for, or how long we can stretch an OCI on, each of those particular engines; however, can enough of those UOAs help us determine the same things about those oils not in any particular engine or engine family, but in any engine generally -- say, for someone whose engine type has never been UOA'd here?
-Tye
