Oil Change

wstar

Great link, lots of good distilled info there. The whole Ester/Motul issue is covered well if you read through it. Basically, they're saying Motul-like oils look great on paper and probably perform great in racing applications (high heat and stress, not much time sitting around the garage oxidizing), but that in a consumer application where the oil isn't heated up and gets to sit around oxidizing more, it may convert itself into a worse oil. This sounds like something that (a) probably is true for many daily-drivers, and (b) is probably highly dependent on individual patterns in driving, mileages, storage lengths (is it often left garaged for days?), local weather, etc, etc..

I'm a little suspicious of the overall graph you pasted, in that it seems that the mean (and deviations) being measured against are going to be heavily influenced by the existing popularity of various brands of oil among those contributing UOA's, since the mean is based on total samples received. It might be interesting to re-run the numbers by first averaging together groups of samples of the same brand/type, then deriving the mean by averaging those numbers together (so that they aren't popularity-weighted).

Still, thanks for posting that, it's very useful information. I'm still going with the Motul on my next change, so we'll get to see how the UOA goes in my case.

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