Has the conventional wisdom changed? I am aware that there are synthetic/natural oil mixes, but presumably chosen to match the synthetic part. All I have seen up to now says don’t mix the two by just pouring the one of top of the other.
I assume by conventional wisdom you mean cautions to not mix types of oil. This stems from the 50’s when detergent motor oil was introduced. Field experience showed that sometimes when detergent oil was put into an engine that had varnish deposits that had built up from long-term use of non-detergent oil, the deposits could break loose and clog critical passages, resulting in oil starvation and causing damage. The subsequent warning to not use non-detergent oil in an engine that had previously only used detergent oil got morphed and exaggerated into don’t switch or mix oil types or brands. I have never seen any official notice from a vehicle manufacturer or motor oil producer to not mix conventional and synthetic oils, and can’t see where “pouring one on top of the other” is in any way different from mixing them before adding them, as in the blends available.
My understanding is that federal and/or industry standards require all motor oils to be compatible with each other. It’s okay to mix viscosities, brands, and base types.
I meant to say before, welcome to the boards - I hope you stick around and are not put off by the tone of some of the responses here. Do you still feel your main question hasn’t been answered?
It seems to me Dodge (as in the manufacturer, via the car manual) are indeed NOT saying synthetic is required - it’s just what the Dodge dealership will do as standard, and they may not be comfortable in using something else. That doesn’t mean that an otherwise valid warranty claim by you will be declared void by Dodge if you use a non-synthetic oil that complies with the specification in the manual.
I don’t think anyone is claiming your question is unreasonable, it’s just that (despite your best efforts in the OP) some other issues and perspectives are being raised.
they don’t. the manual says to use motor oil of the correct viscosity which meets FCA MS-6395. There are conventional motor oils which meet that standard, and there are synthetic and synthetic blends which meet it too. As long as the oil you use is from a recognizable brand (not generic crap on the shelf at 7-11) which states it meets FCA (or Chrysler) MS-6395, you’re fine.
I think part of the confusion is you asked the Dodge dealer about it. the dealer is not Dodge, they’re not Chrysler, they’re not FCA. They are an independently-owned business with a franchise agreement to sell and service Dodge vehicles. They can tell you whatever they want, and everyone knows car dealers have a reputation for honesty (snerk.)
your owner’s manual is the final word. if it doesn’t explicitly say you need synthetic motor oil, you don’t.
I may be guilty of confirmation bias, but I think I’ll stick with my initial thought that a regular oil change is fine. I haven’t counted up all the posts but there is definitely strong opinions that I should (or even must) use Synthetic, and and just as many that conventional perfectly acceptable.
My opinion has only slightly changed that maybe Synthetic is objectively a “better” oil to use. Not necessarily a worthless upsell.
Not to be contrary, but I think you are correct that a regular oil change is fine, however there is a small chance that a future warranty claim on the vehicle could be denied by the manufacturer if you cannot show to their satisfaction that the oil used conformed to the standard in the owner’s manual, and the failure was something to do with the lubrication of the engine.
I think your other conclusion is also correct (in my relatively uninformed opinion) - when I ran a performance car I consciously purchased fully synthetic oil as the price differential was worth it to me - but it wasn’t 3 times the price of regular, that does appear to be dealer mark-up. I also agree with you that for a regular engine that you are rarely driving ‘hard’, it’s less worthwhile.
A large part of how I got a “Bee in my Bonnet” about this issues the insistence of the jiffy lube technician (salesman) that I would “blow my engine” if I didn’t get the platinum full Synthetic $110 oil change. Which I took as a sleazy sales tactic.
I am comfortable, based on this thread, I will not blow my engine using conventional oil. I generally keep a car for about 80k miles. Blown engines are kinda rare in normal use/proper maintenance in my experience.
Maybe if I used full synthetic the engine could last 200k miles. Maybe less if I used conventional oil. But, again, based on info in this thread, I don’t think its going to be an issue for me.
it is, because those places mark up their “full synthetic” oil like crazy. When I had a Dodge SRT-4 (the Neon with the big turbo 4) I took it to one of those places once (once!) they tried to upsell me on the $85 package with full synthetic oil. His pitch was “well, you know what these turbo engines do to their oil” and I cut him off with “Look, man, this car has gone 170,000 miles so far on conventional. I don’t need it.”
$110 syn vs $34.99 conv oil, and they hard sell the synthetic, with that pricing why would that be? it sounds like you need to find another shop. They most likely also sell fishing tackle and electrical hardware as well, and go by the name Bait and Switch
And the price of “conventional” has gone up, as has the performance. Looking at my nearby Walmart’s curbside pickup prices, a 5 qt jug of Pennzoil 5w-20 Conventional is 17.67, and the same size and weight in Pennzoil Platinum synthetic is 21.97. So $4.30 difference, on something that’ll probably be changed once or twice a year.
There’s no real reason not to get synthetic oil these days if you’re doing your own changes.
While they can’t require you to use their oil, they can require you to use oil meeting certain standards to maintain your warranty coverage. So if your car is still under warranty, you have an engine problem, and you can’t prove that you always fed it oil that meets MS-6395 oil, they may deny any warranty claims. Of course, you don’t have to get Mopar oil- any MS-6395 oil will do.
But it’s incorrect to say they “recommend” certain oils- they absolutely require that certain standards be met.
A regular oil change is fine AS LONG AS you use oil that meets the spec indicated in the manual, as many people have pointed out. So if you want a conventional oil change, make the oil being used will meet that spec, and you should be fine. Would you also be fine using one without it? Probably, but you seem concerned about warranty, etc, so I’d do what’s required.
Dealership service departments are almost universally shitty. Look at the recommended maintenance schedule in your owner’s manual, and then look at the dealer’s recommended maintenance schedule. They will be WILDLY different most of the time (not just by mileage, but by what they want you to replace).
In fact, most car manuals will tell you you can go between 5000 and 7500 miles before an oil change, and many many vehicles have an oil life indicator that notifies you when you should get an oil change. Yet still these “experts” at the dealership will put a sticker on your windshield telling you to come back in 3000 miles for another oil change. It does not inspire confidence that they really know your car very well. They want your money, and they want you back so you might walk through the showroom and be interested in purchasing another new car.
That’s wholly a marketing kind of thing- they make a LOT of money on oil changes, so they want you to do them as frequently as possible, even if it’s inside of the recommended interval. And most people are long conditioned to the 3000 miles/3 months interval over decades, and don’t read their manuals, so when the dealership puts a 3k sticker on the windshield, they don’t think anything of it. It’s cynical as hell, but that’s almost certainly the reasoning. I’m sure the mechanics know the actual intervals, and it’s the business people/marketing people who are requiring them to mark it as 3k.
(and FWIW, the VW dealerships we’ve dealt with have NOT done that; they put 10k on the sticker, which is right about when the vehicle’s oil life meter will tick over saying it’s time to get service as well. Which also conveniently is right about one year for my wife’s car in most years!)
And another thing, maintenance schedules can be shitty too; my 2005 pickup has “Regular” and “Severe” schedules (technically “A” and “B”). The “Regular” OCI is 6000 miles and the “Severe” is 3000 miles. The catch is that if you’re doing any of the following:
Stop and Go driving
Short trips under 10 miles
Day or night temps under 32F
More than 50% of your driving in temps over 90F
Extensive Idling
Driving in Dusty Conditions
Trailer Towing
Taxi, Police or Delivery Service
Off Road or Desert Service
Who DOESN’T drive most of their time with at least one, if not two of those all the time? So I’m stuck with a 3k OCI if I follow the rules, but since I’m out of warranty I switched to a 5-6000 mile OCI when I drove about 20 miles a day, and to a once-a-year interval when I drove a little over a mile to the train station and back after I switched jobs.
The newer owner’s manuals are intentionally vague on the exact details of severe maintenance schedules, but all of those things listed are for SUSTAINED activity. If you are stop and go (ie city stoplight to stoplight) all the time with no highway driving, you need additional service. Just because you drove into the city and got in a traffic jam a couple of times does not mean you need to increase your service interval to SEVERE. If “regular” didn’t apply to most people, they would not call it “regular.”
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t drive with one or two of those most of the time at all, except maybe in the winter I am typically below 32 for a couple of months.
Why are oil change intervals in the US so absurdly short?
I work at a dealership in Europe and all the cars we handle have 20-30k km(12.5-18.8k miles) or 1-2 year intervals.
And here I see people talking about 3k mile intervals as being normal.
What’s the cause of this huge difference?
Part of it is that US (and to a lesser extent Japanese) car manufacturers are late in coming around to more stringent oil standards. Most of the big Euro manufacturers- Mercedes-Benz, BMW and VW come to mind, all have very tight standards. For example, the VW 502.00 standard is relatively old, but is STILL far above even the current API or ILSAC standards.
There are many reasons- the Europeans have typically seen much higher prices on petroleum derived products of all sorts, and as a result, have put more emphasis on lengthening oil change intervals AND increasing performance in smaller engines. So their oils are longer-life and higher performance than the comparable US ones.
I mean, say… 20 years ago, you could get a quart (close to a liter) of oil for $1. Somehow I doubt you could have gone into a European auto parts store and got a liter of oil for one Euro, or 50p.
So between lesser demand for performance and a lot of advertising saying 3000 miles or 3 months, people got used to the idea of shorter intervals, and also the correspondingly cheaper conventional oil. Synthetics have been as much as four or five times more expensive per quart than conventional, especially back in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It’s only recently that tighter standards have closed that gap and made synthetics and “conventional” oils (they’re almost all part synthetic now), only about 20% apart in price.
The US manufacturers are coming around though- the GM Dexos 1 standard is pretty similar to a lot of the European standards, and basically requires synthetic oil. Same with the new 0w-16 and the older 0w-20 standards- they both require a semi-synthetic, if not fully synthetic oil.
Give it another 5-10 years, and there will be rough parity in oils and oil changes. Performance wise, the US synthetics like Mobil1 and Castrol Syntec have been similar to the European oils for decades, but most people chose the less capable conventional oils because they weren’t willing to buck the listed OCI, or were brainwashed into thinking 3k/3 mo was the only way to go.
