High Mileage Oils have been around for a few years now, but are they really worth the extra cost? The commercials on T.V. would have you believe that strange things start happening to your engine once it hits 75,000 miles. One would have to ask; why do I need a better oil now?
High mileage motor oil is generally a synthetic blend with additional additives to "recondition" your seals. If your seals need reconditioned like the commercial says they do then what put them in this condition to begin with? Could it possibly be the oil they sold you when your car was new. They also generally include an additive that prohibits the oil from burning off if it does get past the presumably leaky seals.
How Do These Additives Work?
That is a very good question. Unfortunately, there is no readily available answer. No one really knows what exactly goes into high mileage oils that make them so much better. Are the extra additives really worth the extra ten bucks for every oil change. It's not even clear exactly what it is they are adding to the motor oils to perform these tasks.
How Does One Know If Their Car Needs High Mileage Oil?
According to the oil manufacturers, it is generally suggested that you use high mileage oil in any car with an engine that has over 75,000 miles on it. This claim is intriguing for several reasons. For one thing, it's an oddly concrete number considering car manufacturers vary widely on how often you should change your engine's oil. If you look at the directions on the bottles of the few manufacturer's that say how often you should change your oil, they almost always tell you to refer to the owner's manual. Excellent idea. Remeber, car manufacturer's simply give you the minimum spec of oil to use in your car and that's why we are being sucked into changing our oil so often. You should never be using anything less than that, anyway. Most owner's manual assume you won't drive your vehicle past 200,000 miles and after this point who is really referring to their owner's manual. So, at what point does your owner's manual say to begin using "high mileage" oil. I'm betting it doesn't.
Conclusions
The consumer is faced with making a decision using very little facts. The oil companies don't tell us why they figure a high mileage engine needs different oil, and they don't tell us how it does what it does so that we can draw our own conclusions. The 75,000 mile recommendation to switch to high mileage is simply a random figure the oil companies came up with and nothing more. However, that flies in the face of their recommendations to change the oil at the intervals suggested by the manufacturers. So either the oil companies feel that the manufacturer's schedule is not adequate, which begs the question of why are they not telling us what is adequate to keep this so called seal damage from occurring in the first place, or they're just hoping we'll take their word for it and unquestioningly spend the extra money on the "high mileage" version of the same oil that they claim was already doing a good job of keeping your seals in good shape.
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