pmt, I believe the Mobil synthetic av-lube was a PAO ... and it was early PAO's poor miscibility which led to the lube's inability to scavenge lead, therefore the lead deposit build up in the cylinders, therefore the problems.
Anyway, we had a similar thread to this one about 18 months ago where someone copy & pasted some verbage about polyol from Mobil's website and we talked about it. Normally, I'd be begging for participants to "search" for it ... but I can't imagine what you would use for keywords.
Maybe I'll do some digging around for it. It'd be a shame to lose that discussion forever.
I believe that Mobil never intended M1 to be the "ultimate" engine oil. They meant it to offer some practical advantages over mineral formulations (cold weather pumpability, resistance to oxidation, etc ...), be stable over long periods of time, suitable for a wide variety of internal combustion engine applications and be widely available at
a reasonable cost. This description sounds like most M1 formulations.
PAO meets these criteria very well. POE, not nearly so much.
Also, While being a large corporation gives you a tremendous amount of resources and power, there comes a point where size works against you. After working (briefly) for General Electric, I found that if you wanted to pursue a low-volume niche product, it was a daunting task to get approval from the bureaucracy ... and a lot of those executives would look at the expected volumes and conclude with a scornful tone: "We've got bigger fish to fry."
Mobil is better off serving the mass market while letting Red Line, Motul, Synergen, etc ... chase after boutique customers and applications.
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Bror Jace