There is one thing I take exception to, seen in the video, and often practiced nearly everywhere ...
Bias in the testing conditional assumptions. Let me explain ...
In the video, that company went from 20k mile OCIs to 80k mile OCIs. OK - I can accept that. But based on what criteria???
They don't elaborate. Did they do this at the suggestion of the lube rep? UOAs most certainly should be a part of that kind of OCI extension, along with some PCs and such.
But that 4x factor of OCI extension is based upon what?
To accurately understand that ROI payback, you have to know the actual conditions of your starting point.
They started at 20k miles. But why? What makes 20k miles the starting point? Was that the OEM spec'd limit?
My point is this ... What made 20k miles the base value? Did they run many UOAs at those 20k miles, and determine that the wear rates were at a max permissible limit? Did they end up deciding that 20k miles equaled some data-drive codemnation limit? Was the Fe at a top magnitude limit (100ppm?) or did that Fe wear rate max out at 5ppm/1k miles? Or what?
Get the point? WHY was 20k miles the starting basis for the OCI consideration?
For that matter, why was 80k miles the end point? Again, what criteria did they find that led them to that 80k mile limit?
This is the crux of my complaints on nearly every UOA I see here.
If we were to imagine ourselves as young, youthful athelets, and we wanted to run or swim "better", would we first not need to know our baseline at the beginning of the season? If I take the summer off, and start running on day one of the season, I can run "X" miles in "Y" minutes. I hope to improve that. Or, I swim "X" meters in "Y" seconds. Then, after much work, I can trim off time and reassess my performance. My point is that we don't really know how well I'm improving if we don't accurately measure the baseline of my starting point.
In this video, we see an increase of the OCI duration. And we assign some measure of improvement; here it's a factor of 4x. But we really don't KNOW the TRUE benefit, because we are only assuming what they tell us. And to be frank, I seriously doubt they really know the truth either.
Most all of the time, OCI limits are arbitrary. They are set by some moderately educated guess. But to really KNOW, you have to test the baseline conditions.
In this video, I'd be more impressed if they said something to this effect ...
We ran our normal lube to a point where we had to condemn it at 23,500 miles as a fleet average. This was due to the wear metal of Fe/Al/Cu/Pb being at a max limit as determined by guidelines of the OEM. And, we saw an uptick of the wear-rates indicating that the lube had reached a point where it is being usurped by the contamination loading, and while not horribly detrimental to the engine, it was a prudent move to change the oil as the uptick in wear is likely to predicate actual damage. This info from our fleet averages indicates that 23,500 miles is the safe practical limit for our base lube choice. We then did the same thing using the Delvac 1 lube. Using the same condemnation limits, we were able to achieve 81,500 miles of use. Therefore, we were able to gain a ROI of 3.4x more OCI. Given that the Delvac 1 costs 2.8x more money, it is a prudent move to use the more expensive choice; this is because a 3.4x extension on a 2.8x invesment gives a positive ROI.
See my point?
I SERIOUSLY doubt that any baseline was actually determined other than some OEM arbitrary limit. I don't know this for sure, but I've been around the maintenance industry my entire adult life and often the "baseline" is just someone's guestimate.
For example, how many times have we seen "severe" service limits published in OEM manuals; those limits are often far less than the "normal" use factors. Take any typical car or light-duty truck, and you'll see something akin to normal use of 5,000 miles, but only 3,000 if sever factors. My wife's old Villager van had those limits. But my UOA data (and that of hundreds of others) showed that the VG30E Nissan engine really didn't exhibit any shift in wear trends whatsoever, despite the OCI duration or severity factor. In fact, our van was used about as "severe" as you could ever imagine; total soccer-mom type use of start/shut-down, short trips, cold and heat, etc. And yet when I ran my UOAs to track the wear rates, even when we went out to 15k miles, the wear data didn't budge. All on dino oil and a MC filter. And so, despite the fact that we went 5x (five times) longer than the "severe" service factor, the wear data showed that the combination of longer OCI and "severe" use didn't matter at all; not one bit. Simply put, the OEM limits really were not limits at all; not as a measure of the engine/lube combination. Therefore, unless I were to test the dino oil and MC filter to an OCI duration that actually showed an uptick in wear, then I really don't know what my "baseline" is, should I have opted to contrast that lube/filter combo to some syn. All I know is that the OEM limits are GROSSLY conservative; the lube is not anywhere near taxed at those limits and in fact can go MUCH further without any undue stress.
So, to my point, it's only impressive in this video that they decided to go 4x longer with the Devlac 1 if you accept the fact that it's quite likely that both the 20k and 80k mile limits were probably arbitrary in the first place. Are we supposed to believe that it's exactly a 4x factor on the OCI? And there's zero mention of the costs involved. It certainly isn't the same for the base oil as the Delvac 1, so it's not a true "4x" ROI. What if the Delvac 1 was able to provide a 4x factor in the OCI, but the cost was 3x? The true ROI would really be 1.333x; not that this is a bad value, but it's nowhere near as impressive as 4x that the video implies. We'll never know because it's really not well defined, (and probably not even known), what the "real" baseline OCI limit actually is. And therefore we cannot presume that the ROI is 4x; it's unknown. What we do know is that their ARBITRAY limits are 4x, and the ROI is something well less than that because surely the syn costs more than the base lube.
Just my two pennies here.