Can Engine Oil Be Proven To Last 20,000 Miles?

Hello everyone and welcome to Mole One Annual Protection so this is an oil that they claim will

last

20,000

miles

and I think one of the big challenges for us as consumers is that when you walk into a parts store you see all these different bottles, all these different claims and it's very difficult to know what testing has actually been done behind the scenes to know whether or not those claims can be trusted, so I've worked with Mobil 1 in the past talking about this product and reached out with them again and said, "Hey, would you do it." You guys will be interested and really show all the testing, the formulation, what happens behind the scenes so we can take a look.

You know why they make this statement. How did you come to the conclusion that this oil can

last

20,000

miles

on the

engine

? And the next thing I knew, I spent two days at the mobile research and

engine

ering facility and got an exclusive look at what goes on behind the scenes, a lot of the testing that goes on and that's what we're going to talk about in this. The video is the process of coming up with this marketing claim and what happens behind the scenes. It's great. I'm really excited that we're seeing this kind of behind-the-scenes look at the world, you know, the world of engineering, testing. world that I come from, that happens behind the scenes and that rarely you, as a consumer, really get to see.

Now, something that I think is extremely important to understand initially is that engineering is not just throwing a product in a bottle, throwing it away. to marketing and then say "ok", put some stickers on it, make some statements, so that the opposite happens, then marketing does their research, determines what product they want to develop and says to the engineering team: "Hey, can you guys make a oil that lasts 20,000 miles?" and then engineering decides, you know, they formulate a plan, they create that oil, and they work on their plan to determine whether or not it can actually deliver on the marketing claim that the marketing team wants to make, which brings us to how the rest works. from This video will play, so it all starts with marketing saying, we want you guys to develop a product that will last 20,000 engine miles and then the formulation engineers spend time, you know, trying to create the perfect formula that they think we can. to complete that task that marketing wants, then they use that formula, they put it through some lab testing, basically, these are more cost-effective tests to chew on and then measure whether they need to do additional testing or whether they need to re-learn their formulation. some tuning and see if they can do better on these lab screening tests, then you get into much more expensive testing, so you have to be sure of yourself before you start doing engine testing, you do external dyno testing that They call Mads. testing and then you can do field testing and then once you have all this data from all of your testing, you can say, okay, did it really last 20,000 miles or not?

You have all that data to prove your claim and then you can come out with that marketing claim, so we're going to work through each of these, the formulation through the different levels of proof and how they arrive at that marketing claim, so my first stop in the engineering facility was the formulation lab and essentially when you look at a bottle of oil, 80 to 90 percent is made up of base oils and then 10 to 20 percent is made up of additives. Now the base oil is what provides many of the important properties, such as viscosity. of the oil, how thick it is at high temperatures, how well it flows at low temperatures and also its volatility, how easily this oil evaporates, of course you don't want the oil to evaporate because if it does, it just burns in your engine.

These are the characteristics that the base oil provides, but additives can improve the properties of this oil now. Mobil 1 essentially tests all the different additives that are on the market and then they choose the percentages of each additive that they find. be beneficial to your formula, so one of these additives are viscosity index improvers or VI improvers, these are large molecules that prevent the oil from becoming too diluted while it is heated. Another additive, antioxidants, are used to prevent the oil from oxidizing or breaking down. You can think of it like blueberries or dark chocolate for humans, basically they are trying to react with the oil to prevent heat and oxygen from degrading it or to minimize the effect of the breakdown of the oil so that it lasts a long time and The viscosity does not change over time antiwear additives are very good so what they do is absorb and react with metal surfaces so they create a sacrificial layer that is constantly removed and replaced for example where you have the camshaft and your lifter that is used to open and close the valves will create a layer on that rotating camshaft and that lifter that is constantly being removed and replaced, preventing the metal from touching each other and creating any place, so of course on mobile devices there is an annual protection that The additive must be able to last twenty thousand miles.

Ash list dispersants are used to prevent sludge from accumulating. Basically what these dispersants are going to do is they're going to stick to the mud precursors or the deposit precursors and they're going to keep that mud or deposit suspended within the oil. instead of fixing it, for example, to the pistons so that you can filter it or drain it so that you don't have that sludge and those deposits build up inside the engine. It is very important for cleaning the pistons. A detergent somewhat similar to ash dispersants, their job. is to keep the engine clean attached to the deposits and prevent those deposits from forming on the pistons, things like that, however, they are also used to neutralize acids, which is why combustion leaks occur and as those combustion gases They pass through the piston and react. with the oil they can become acidic and that is why detergents are there to help neutralize this reaction and not have an acidic oil inside the engine and finally we obtain 2d promotions that, as their name indicates, among other things, are used to prevent the formation of foaming so the engine is spinning at very high speeds of course the oil is churning and you don't want it to foam so that's what that additive is used for okay now that we have an idea of ​​what basically happens with the experimental formulation.

What happens next is they take the desired percentages of each of these additives and base oils that they want, they mix them all together, they heat them to 82 degrees Celsius for an hour and now they have a test sample and with this sample formula they they move Let's move on to the lab evaluation with that formula to determine if you can pass the test you need. Now one of the many preliminary tests is called TS 33 C and this is a test that was developed by Chrysler to help them predict turbocharger cleanliness if their engines could be expected to use specific oils, so in this case the test requires a stainless steel rod and the oil flows around this stainless steel rod and that temperature varies from 200 degrees Celsius to 480 degrees Celsius.

Now it's not just a temperature difference that's happening. The oil also flows through a reactor vessel where it is bubbled with nitrous oxide and oxygen on top of an iron catalyst that is added before the test begins, all to make this a test that is very difficult for the oil to pass, so the oil flows from the reactor vessel to the test rod, then returns to the reactor vessel and the cycle continues. Now the test itself is made up of twelve cycles lasting nine and a half minutes each, where the oil temperature varies from 200 C to 480 C and then drops again. at 200 C and this is a test of about two hours, so the metal rod is weighed before the test and then the oil is cleaned and weighed again measuring the deposits that have accumulated on it and also weighing a external filter which is is used to capture any deposits that may have fallen off the test rod and to pass this test you must have less than thirty milligrams of accumulated deposits in total and the example we are looking at here is approximately 20 milligrams on this rod, what it would be to pass the test with the healthy margin remaining now, two additional bench tests of the many that exist or an oxidation stability test and a thin film oxidation test, both can help you learn how this oil reacts with the time.

It lasts a long time, so the first test, this oxidation stability test, is a proprietary test developed by Exxon Mobil. Basically, it involves heating the oil by adding air and a catalyst to help the reaction break down even further as to how long this oil can last. you measure the viscosity over time as it undergoes this test and so initially you know that if they designed something and noticed that the viscosity increases too quickly over time, then they reformulated it and basically just tried to extend this curve of viscosity as long as You can make it work so it can last a long time without the viscosity changing and that's what you know, you're not going to have the protection that your engine is talking about so initially if you look at the curve of your real Mobil one product.

The annual protection decreases initially and there may be a small drop in viscosity due to oxidation of the VI improvers, but basically if any molecule larger than initially was broken down, that would reduce the viscosity. Now you will eventually see that as the oil oxidizes, larger molecules start to appear. is forming and these larger molecules are the ones that are starting to increase that viscosity and then you can see that eventually it gets into this kind of X rate where you start to get more and more larger molecules and you have a severe increase in viscosity, so you want to make sure the oil doesn't do this too soon you want to make sure it lasts the length of the engine oil drain interval the second test here involves oxidation basically what they do is take a rotating aluminum disc and you circulate the oil in the center of that disk and then you spin it over the disk and this oil is at a high temperature and the test has a very long duration, so you basically keep running it and you start to see the varnish start to appear. and then you know you can start to form these deposits on that spinning disk now as this carbon builds up, this carbon acts as an insulator, so for scenarios like the turbocharger, the turbo shaft you don't want carbon to build up on it. because is not like that.

It will be able to reject that heat to the oil moving around it, so the carbon acts as an insulator, so it's quite interesting to look at the difference between a high mileage synthetic blend versus a standard synthetic and Mobil's annual protection One. The standard and Mobil synthetic annual protection. annual protection when passing this test you may see some varnish on the standard synthetic but you know there isn't a huge difference mechanically it will still work fine and then there isn't too much varnish on the Mobil and its protection compared to the high mileage synthetic . The mixture actually fails the test and you can see significant carbon buildup in it, so at this point we have seen some of the testing that has been done with the laboratory evaluations and now you can continue to assume that everything is fine and that your formula is working within these laboratory evaluations until the next step, which is the engine test.

The first of the two engine tests we are going to talk about is the AGM turbo test and this is a test that you must pass in order for GM to say its product. is compatible with their engines, so a 1.4 liter Ecotec engine is used and basically the turbocharger is analyzed for any negative effects that may occur with that turbocharger as a result of using it with a specific engine oil, so this is a 500 hour test and it cycles mid to high rpm and then the engine shuts down and lets the turbocharger absorb all that heat and you know you no longer have flow for that oil so the oil just sits inside . of that turbocharger immersed in that heat now no coolant is used in testing so the oil is there to lubricate and also to cool the turbocharger and basically as carbon deposits start to form inside the turbocharger those deposits carbon acts as an insulator and you can see this by measuring a temperature differential across the turbocharger, so if you're not rejecting as much heat, you could be building up carbon deposits inside that turbocharger, so there are very specific heat parameters that you must be able to pass in order to pass.

This test measures that temperature differential and looks for that carbon buildup. Now once the test is complete, you actually cut the turbocharger in half and then inspect the part, so you inspect the turbocharger, the bearings, the internal components andlook where. you're looking for varnish and deposits, so this turbocharger that we're looking at here split in half is actually the one that was used when the mobile annual protection was tested, another engine test uses a Toyota 2nr EFI engine and This test is designed to examine the lift buckets and you know the interaction between the camshafts and the lift buckets that are used to open the intake and exhaust valves and to see whether or not there is any wear on the lift bucket where you have it. very high pressure interaction so this is a two hundred hour test and the American Society for Testing Materials sets the requirements for this test and basically how it works is the engine goes from idle to 4300 RPM and it does this every six to seven seconds and Now it's cycling 24,000 times, on top of the engine there are two cooling jackets that go through the valve train and the coolant is at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius and the reason this is done is to keep Those valvetrain temperatures are low, so this creates a similar situation to when you start your car and you know you're basically at ambient temperatures, so starting the car is where the most wear will occur, etc.

This test reduces those temperatures to help accelerate wear within the test. Now, after completing those 24,000 cycles, the wear on the elevator buckets is measured, so they use a scanning machine that takes a 3D image of the elevator and actually measures the volume of material. that has been removed from those elevator buckets, you can evaluate the lost material and determine whether or not it passes this test. Okay, let's move on now that we've passed the engine tests, we can move on to the crazy tests. MADD stands for mileage accumulation dynamometer support. And this is where the testing starts to get really exciting for me, so there are eight outdoor dinosaurs that Mobil One has in this facility that they can run vehicles with, so they're outside and they picked three different vehicles to test out and take them around. at 120,000 miles. with 20,000 mile oil change intervals so the first vehicle is a 2015 Lexus NX 200t, it has a direct injection turbocharged two liter engine and uses zero w 20 engine oil.

The next vehicle is a Ford Fusion se 2016, which is a 1.5-liter EcoBoost engine. direct injection and 5w 20 motor oil and then the final core is a 2015 Chevy Malibu 2 liter turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine and this one uses 5w30 so each of these uses a different weight of oil and you know they all They are turbocharged, they are small The engines are direct injection and the reason for choosing these vehicles is basically where the industry is going so you see a lot of small displacement turbocharged high boost engines so these engines have temperatures and very high internal pressures and are very harsh on the oil as a result of being turbocharged, which is why Mobil one selected them for testing.

Now the test itself is a pretty severe test cycle where they simulate driving on a city road, going up hills and driving with a trailer, and so the way you can tell simulating these hills or trailers is by using a brake on the dyno so the car has to overcome the power to overcome that brake that is trying to slow down now for all three vehicles every 5,000 miles the oil is Tested and inspected and every 20,000 miles the oil and The oil filter is changed during the total duration of the test which lasts 120,000 miles, so six time periods know 20,000 miles on the oil and on the oil filter now after one hundred and twenty thousand.

The miles are complete, there is a visual inspection of the entire engine, all components, so the engine is completely stripped down and all components are tested to industry standards. Now the technicians who perform this analysis do not know what components and what engine oils were used. in these certain components, so they're just looking at it, they have no idea if it's a competitive product or if it's a rolling annual protection that they're looking at to make sure there's no bias and their rating scale, so this engine What we're looking at here is the NX 200t torn apart and there's a rating scale that they use to look at the varnish, the sludge, the carbon deposits and analyze these parts, so anything that touches the oil is analyzed, so here We can see the Lexus block, the crankshaft, the crankshaft bearings, the connecting rods, the pistons, the camshaft and the valve cover.

Now, in addition to engine disassembly at 120,000 miles, motor oil samples are taken from vehicles every 5,000 miles and these oil samples are taken. They are analyzed under several tests, so two of the spectroscopy tests they undergo are ICP and FTIR, so we will talk about ICP or inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy. Now this device uses a plasma torch and injects a sample of oil into that plasma so that the oil becomes an aerosol and is then vaporized, atomized and finally ionized by the high energy plasma. Now, when these ions are excited by the plasma, they emit photons of specific wavelengths.

On the left you can see a camera and this is essentially a massive image sensor. which records the wavelength of light emitted by the oil passing through the plasma torch. These specific wavelengths are an almost fingerprint-like indication of what metals are present in the oil. Now specific elements are correlated to specific engine components so you can tell if there are multiple metals. that wear out too quickly inside the engine, for example if you see too much aluminum you could be looking at a piston where if there is copper it could be in the piston rings, the bearings, the liners, if there is iron it could be in the engine block and cylinders, if there is nickel there could be places in the valve bearings and there is a long list of different items that you can learn about and basically you want to see them all very well controlled and not increased by massive amounts of these metals. inside the oil samples to know that the engine is running healthily, so it's great to look at the data and see that the copper and iron remain within their limits during the hundred and twenty thousand mile test.

Now you're not just monitoring. where the elements during these five thousand mile intervals are also looking at the viscosity of the oil and making sure that it stays within the SAE grade requirements for those twenty thousand mile intervals and if they did this with each of the vehicles and they all stayed within the viscosity requirements that they needed, even with a duration and a twenty thousand mile oil change interval, also during the five thousand mile intervals, you are measuring acidity or measuring base numbers, you are measuring oxidation , it's measuring nitration and all of these have to stay within tolerances for those twenty thousand mile intervals for a total of one hundred and twenty thousand miles and in order for this test to pass they now ran an additional test on the external dynamometers x' where they put half million miles on a Chevy Silverado, so once again, using twenty thousand mile oil drain intervals and doing this for five hundred thousand miles, now this was put on a highway cycle that is less intense but allows them to go a lot more miles on the car in less time. and see how it performs in that scenario now if any of the components that touch the oil were to fail they would end the test and an example of something they ended up changing unrelated to the engine oil where the transmission needed to be replaced three hundred thousand miles , but none of the engine oil related components had to be replaced, they all lasted five hundred thousand miles and then you know they took the engine out to take it apart and they inspect it at half a million miles, so other than during the teardown, they also did interval testing with this vehicle, where they took oil samples and made sure you knew the viscosity index.

It stayed within SAE specs for those five hundred thousand miles during the twenty thousand mile interval oil drain intervals they did. they made sure the metals were kept under control, the copper in the iron, everyone was kept within limits and they also monitored the presence of mud on the deck, so they watched it every hundreds of thousands of miles to make sure that The valve train was running smoothly and there was no sludge build up, so it was a pretty impressive test and they put five hundred thousand miles on the vehicle and then of course once that was done the engine is completely disassembled, they inspect visually all the components and make sure there is no sludge, there is no excessive wear, there is no excessive wear. carbon deposits that have built up, analyzing that engine after it has been dismantled after those five hundred thousand miles, now in addition to Mads' tests, Mobil 1 actually owns 91 lucky taxis in Las Vegas, temperatures so high, much idle time, things like that they test their products, they've been running that program since 2004 and the idea of ​​this video is to give you an eclipse and it's certainly not an exhaustive list, but a glimpse of the testing that goes on behind scene that they usually don't get to see before they come up with these marketing claims about what a product can do now.

One of the big questions many of you were asking in the first video was: are there really oil filters that can last 20,000 miles? They are basically filters that already last about 15,000 miles and Mobil 1 was doing tests to determine if they really last 20,000 miles and they found that the media can actually handle it, the internal filter can actually handle that 20,000 miles. What they did need to change for these extended filters that last 20,000 miles is the actual rubber gasket that sits against the engine block, so that material really needed to be improved to last those 20,000 miles, but the media itself was fine. filter for that extra 5,000 miles compared to a 15,000 mile oil filter.

Something else I think is important to mention is that a year is a long time without looking at your car, so know that they certainly aren't saying "hey, no." No need to touch your car for a year, if your car burns a lot of oil, then you still need to replace the burning oil. You know there are maintenance things you need to address a year from now, so it's not wise to do so. you just know you put in your one year old oil and let it sit for a year and that's the only thing you have to think about, you still need to keep up with your vehicle, it's also important if your vehicle is under oil warranty.

The drain interval is set by the manufacturer, so you don't want to deviate from that oil drain interval if your car is actually under warranty. This has been a wealth of information. I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes as much as I did. Take a look at what goes into the development of a motor oil. If you have any questions or comments, of course, feel free to leave them below, thanks for watching.