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Under what conditions would most people use a synthetic oil.
I use high end Synthetic in my cars, because I found the performance is better AND it's more economical for me. The better performance is hard to quantify, but it's clearly noticable when driving the cars (the cars are just more "responsive", not to mention "quieter", when stepping on the gas). And the better starting in the winter (i.e. the cold) is also very noticable.
Why is it cheaper, you ask? Because the combo of good synthetic and extra-good oil filtration, lets me greatly increase my OCI (even Mobil-1 seems to be good for around 10k OCI, when combined with decent filtration, and I'm hoping/expecting the Amsoil oil to go even further). And the cost savings from fewer oil changes (part of that being labor cost savings, as I don't change my own oil), more than makes up for the extra oil and filter costs.
And that analysis doesn't even take into consideration the fact that I seem to get slightly better gas mileage on synthetic (vs what I was getting with dino). It's hard to quantify, but the benefit seems to be there. And if I'm even saving a percent or two of gas, that's got to be "worth it" with today's gas prices.
So for me, a good synthetic is a clear "win-win", in that it costs less (then more frequent oil changes with dino) to use, as well as giving me results that I prefer.
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I'm not trying to start a war but if you change your oil every 3-5K miles your car/truck should last atleast 200K.
And that's probably true. And from that perspective, synthetic really isn't "needed" in most cases.
However, as others have said, there is little debate that synthetics work better. The only real question becomes, is it enough better to "justify the cost". And that is clearly a more YMMV thing.
But for me, I've driven every one of our vehicles with dino oil and with synthetic. And without exception, the cars/trucks seem to "drive better" (quieter, more performance when I step on the gas, etc) on the synthetic. And since I have to change the synthetic less often, the synthetic actually doesn't cost me anything more to use. So for me, the choice is obvious.
However, which approach you choose to go with (short OCIs with dino, or longer OCIs with synthetic and better filters), is really up to the individual to decide. But for me, I would much rather have a long lasting oil and filter, and change it less often, than go to iffy-lube every few weeks. My wife and I really do put a lot of miles on our "commuter cars", and neither of us likes to change oil. So for us, the ability to extend out OCIs is actually a real "time savings" for us, above and beyond the cost savings (and better performance) of the synthetic.
BTW:
Even my wife is sold on the better performance we appear to get from the synthetics. About the only times we still run dino in any vehicles we own (we even have synthetic oil in the lawn mower), is on those few occasions when we are doing an Auto-RX cleaning/rinse (since Auto-RX cleans/rinses better on dino). But the last time we did this, my wife was just waiting for the Auto-RX treatment to be completed, so we could go back to the performance we get out of the synthetics...
