|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Home | Product Reviews & Shopping | Music Reviews First of all, are you zealous when it comes to changing your oil? In other words, if the manual says to change your oil every 5000 miles, do you have the oil changed at 4999.9? If you follow an oil change regimen, chances are you won’t benefit from synthetic oil. Synthetic oil is highly resistant to breakdown and sludge forming. However, most regular oil won’t breakdown unless excessive time and/or mileage passes between changes. Because most the benefits of synthetic oil over regular oil don’t show until the oil is subjected to adverse conditions, you really won’t see any benefit from synthetic unless you stress the oil. If you are the type that might forget an oil change (shame on you), or if maybe you don’t get to changing your oil right at 5000 (or within 500 miles of 5000), then you can buy a little insurance against engine damage by using synthetic oil. For instance my aunt drives about 7k miles per year. At that rate she's only going to see an oil change about every 9 months. Since regular oil starts to wear out after 6 months, she should use synthetic. The best advice I can give you is think about who is in charge of maintaining the vehicles in your family and recommend synthetic oil to those people that will exceed the time threshold or those people that might space an oil change. There's one other big benefit to synthetic oil, and that's heat resistance. If you subject your oil to lots of heat on a regular basis, than synthetic might be the oil for you. Situations that generate lots of heat include any time the engine is running but the vehicle isn't moving, or it is moving very slowly. In these situations, there is little or no air circulating to cool the engine and things get hot. Regular oil may start to lose it's protectant properties in these situations. So, if you spend a lot of time idling or in stop and go traffic, synthetic is for you. Also, extreme conditions like high elevations or high air temperatures will also create high heat in your engine. These would be other circumstances where you would benefit from using synthetic. Synthetic oil is most often used in high performance vehicles. If you are utilizing your vehice like a high-performance car (high speeds, fast turns, you know who you are) then synthetic is a smart choice. There's quite a bit of advice out their about using synthetic if you drive in a big city with lots of bad traffic, or if you only drive short distances. As far as traffic goes, it's all relative. If you're maintaining an average speed of 20mph in your commute, you're ok to run regular oil. As for the short distance advice, I can't stress enought that no oil will protect your engine from the damage of a three mile trip once a day. Engines are supposed to ran for a few miles before you shut them off, otherwise oil doesn't circulate properly and you will see premature engine wear. My advice to you is to drive farther if you can. After reading this, you may have determined that synthetic oil is the oil for you. Use caution when purchasing synthetic oil. Sometimes your maintanence facility will suggest a synthetic blend to you as a way to save some cash. I suggest you pass. Most synthetic blends don't tell you how much of the oil is synthetic and how much is regular. Remember -- technically, synthetic blend could be 1% synthetic and 99% not. No blends (unlesss they're recommnded by Toyota). So you say that's all fine and good, but what do the people that MAKE the vehicles think? Toyota has no stance on synthetic oil, they only want you to use good oil and change it regularly. Bottomline: Unless you’re subjecting your new 2007 Toyota Tundra (and the oil that’s in it) to extreme conditions, save money and use regular oil. Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com
About the author: Jason Lancaster has been working in the auto industry and with the Toyota Tundra for the better part of a decade. Find more Tundra Info at his website, www.tundraheadquarters.com.
|
 RSS Feeds by Category |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
