Originally posted by: tcsenter
This is not possible because for accuracy each car would have to be started, stopped, driven the same way and in the same conditions. It may be possible to do in a lab, but would be very time consuming to synthesise the life of an engine on a dyno.
What are you talking about? Wow this is starting to resemble a discussion with a religious type about the existance of God. "It can't be seen, it can't be measured, it can't be quantified, it can't be proven, but
I know for a fact it exists!" I guess we'll just have to "trust you", eh? lol!
Synthetic oil marketers don't say "Our product does what we claim it does but
only if you use it
exactly as we have outlined in our 2,094 page 'Lifetime Maintenance, Care, and Use Plan", an excerpt from which we have reprinted below:
Day 1: Drive vehicle 42 miles at 55MPH in 30'C temperatures not to exceed 80% relative humidity, accelerating or deccelerating at a rate no greater than [xx] feet per second, applying brake pressure no greater than [xx] lbs and no longer than [xx] continuous seconds, and allowing to idle no more than 300 seconds and no less than 14 seconds in any single idle-incident, and no more than 30 minutes cumulatively... ~ ...Day 1,246: Drive vehicle 12 miles at 60MPH in 32'C temperatures not to exceed 80% relative humidity, accelerating or deccelerating at a rate no greater than [xx] feet per second, applying brake pressure no higher than [xx]lbs, and allowing to idle no more than 100 seconds and no less than 14 seconds in any single idle-incident, and no more than 10 minutes cumulatively... ~ ...Day 2074: Congratulations! You are now at 62.6% of Mean Time Between Engine Failure Using Synthetic Oil (MTBEF-USO) according to our Lifetime Averaged Performance Test Using Synthetic Oil LAPT-USO #1103! Had you used conventional oil, you would now be at 82.3% Mean Time Between Engine Failure Using Conventional Oil (MTBEF-UCO)!"
Where do synthetic oil marketers say that you
must drive 'only in this certain way and at this certain speed and only during this kind of traffic or in this kind of weather' in order to realize a benefit from synthetic oil? If the benefits of synthetic oil cannot be measured in a "real world" test of vehicles but only in a laboratory, what does that say? To any rational person who does not accept "blind faith" as the basis of their conclusions, it means there is no benefit to be realized outside of the laboratory.
And really, does it matter if one car had its oil changed at 5,000 miles and another was 4,500 miles and another was 5,500 miles? Or that one car stopped 100 more or less times than another?
We are, after all, talking about the alleged benefits of synthetic oil due to a cumulative protective effect over a long period of time. This could be measured rather easily...if it existed. It does not.