ENGINEER EXPLAINS HOW OFTEN TO CHANGE OIL & FILTER // UPDATED CRITERIA-BASED RECOMMENDATIONS!

hello everyone it's David from autom press as you know I love talking about engineering and technical things and one of the videos I created before has gotten a lot of comment and also created some controversy and that has to do with how often to change the engine oil and the oil filter now I've made a couple videos already on it but people keep asking me the same questions over and over again in terms of how I came to that decision and exactly what kind of uh engine oil frequency you should follow based on the type

of driving you might do so I'm going to do another video right here to try to clarify my suggestions for when to change the oil or how often to change the oil and how to determine that using a very simple criteria to help you figure out what's the right situation for you so I'm going to basically rank your situation or your car station into three categories rank a rank B and rank C with correspond in different requirements and then you can then figure out what is the right kind of oil change interval might be so

let's get right into it so why even talk about oil change well that's because oil change and then the corresponding filter change are the two most important things you can do to prolong the life of a car for internal combustion engine or IC and as you guys know many of us want to hang on to our IC or gasoline engine cars for a long time because they might go away in a few or several years replaced by electric cars and so there's even more reasons these days to keep these vehicles running in a tiptop shape

at the same time depending on how long you plan to keep the car the condition will change so for example if you want to keep the car forever 2025 30 years then the requirements or recommendation for oil change will be different than if you're just leasing it or financing it for 3 or 4 years and you plan to exchange the car every few years because in that case you don't really need to follow a very stringent oil change recommendation so let me give you three scenarios very simple three scenarios to help you decide what to

do with your particular situation so I'm going to break it into a b or c ranking a applies to those people who wants to keep the car for 10 or even 20 years or longer and for those of you who plan to drive the car for very long time up to maybe even 250,000 mil or half a million miles or maybe who knows maybe even somehow reach 1 million miles for those of you who want to keep the car for that length of time which is essentially forever then use my recommendation for criteria a what

about for those people who are not as picky so you're not going to keep it for 10 20 30 years but you still want to keep the car in a good condition well that's what I call criteria B and how I Define criteria B are those people who wants to keep the car for let's say 4 to 10 years and then maybe up to to 250,000 Mi maybe 100 to 250,000 Mi so fa lengthy time but not as long as a criteria a and perhaps the B is the one that applies to most of you

because many of us do end up keeping the car for about that length of time sort of four to 10 years and then maybe 100,000k to 250k that's criteria B and then finally there's a ranking or criteria C which is what I call the minimalist version that's the one that requires the least amount of maintenance and how do I Define C C is for those people who wants to just keep the car for kind of 1 to 4 years 25,000 to 100,000 mil or maybe even less which actually really means that you're keeping the car

for maybe just a duration of the lease or financing which is often 1 to four years long and therefore you're not too worried about the durability or long-term effect of the vehicle because you're going to be changing in a few years anyway so that's the criteria C or ranking C so now let me explain to you what to do depending on which of those you fit in a B or C now before I go too far keep in mind that a lot of people think oil change is because the oil itself has degraded and no

longer acting as a lubricant and therefore we have to change well actually that is not quite true because oil is capable of keeping its lubricant capability or property for very long time but the problem is that the oil gets dirty partly because engine does mix a little of gas and air into the oil mixture but also because does remove some contaminants within the engine so the engine oil itself even though it's still functioning as a proper oil actually gets kind of dirty because it's carrying contaminants and that's why we have to change oil it's not

because it lost its property so that's something to keep in mind also some of you guys said hey if you use synthetic oil then it will last even longer right well it does because the property of a lubricant last longer but it still removes contaminant it is still getting dirty and there's still still a mixture of gasoline and other things gets into the oil so it doesn't matter how good the oil itself is even if it's synthetic you still have to replace them having said that I will say if you're using synthetic versus a cheaper

oil you can probably add about th000 miles to the recommendation numbers I'm going to give you right now but not much more than that so let me get through this a b and c stuff right now again just to remind you criteria A is for those people who wants to keep the car for 10 20 years even more than that perhaps 250,000 Mi or longer and essentially they want to keep the car forever as long as it's possible for those of you who wants to keep it in the tiptop a condition well you've got to

change the oil every 3,000 miles even more often if you really can afford it or you don't mind doing it but at least as a minimum every 3,000 miles or approximately 5,000 kilm and also don't forget to change the oil filter at the same time that pretty well applies to everything I think every time you change the oil you should just change the oil filter as well even though you could theoretically speaking keep the oil filter sometime for every two oil change but I think right now I'm going to just say for all situations just

change the oil filter at the same time as engine oil uh once again if you use a synthetic oil then you can add thousand miles to the interval I just mentioned to you but regardless of the mileage I would also change every 6 month because of the fact that some of the properties of the oil will begin to change over time so again if you want to keep the car for a very long time or literally forever change every 3,000 mil or approximately 5,000 km and or every six month what about for those people who

are in the B criteria which is a little bit less stringent and it's the one that applies to many of us again reminder that criteria B applies to those of you who wants to keep the car for let's say 4 to 10 years 100,000 to 250,000 miles approximately speaking so this one applies to many of you guys or most of you guys including perhaps myself because usually I change my car every four to five years or even more frequent than that and in that case you've got to change the oil and the oil filter every

5,000 m or approximately every 8,000 km and once again at th000 Miles if you're using synthetic but change the oil filter at the same time as the oil and so that way you are still changing the oil pretty often 5,000 miles is still quite frequent but you're not wasting too much money changing it too often and I think this one applies to most of you guys and this recommendation is very much in alignment with what AMD or Amed said in his carier nut channel uh he also said about 5,000 miles for most of you guys

and he and I'm good friends we stay in touch and so forth and we're both completely aligned in terms of some of these recommendation so that's for criteria B what about those of you who fits into criteria C which is the least stringent criteria so that criteria applies to those people who want to keep the the car for just one to four years up to 100,000 miles at the most but most likely maybe even 50,000 mil or so these are kind of short-term owners or people who are leasing or financing for a short time and

they know for a fact every few years they're going to change the car and they don't plan to keep the car longer they don't plan to buy it out after a lease and give it to their friends or family and therefore they don't really want to spend the money they just want to spend the minimum amount of time and money on it once again because they don't to be a long-term owner in that case what I'm going to tell you is to Simply follow the manufacturer's recommendation that's in your owner's manual and that changes from

car to car from Brands to Brands so you have to look up under your own owner's manual but in most cases that's around 10 to 12,000 miles or once a year is usually what they recommend so that's pretty well what I can expect from most brands and most cars and that's totally fine you're not doing anything wrong you're still following exactly what the manufacturers are telling to do so therefore you don't void the warranty the engine will still be in good shape but it might not last you know 20 30 years if you only follow

the manufacturers recommendation uh you will still have to change both oil and oil filter and once again if you're using synthetic you might want to add th000 miles to that range although because it's so long already I would be hesitant to recommend you add any more mileage to the interval mileage because now it's getting really long so that would be my recommendation for those people who follow under the criteria C who wants to minimize the cost who really don't plan to keep the car and they just want to return the car to dealership when the

lease ends or they just want the trading every few years yes then in that case don't waste your money just follow the manufacturers recommendation so those are the three criteria I want to talk about which will simplify your decision- making process and hopefully this makes more sense for you because each situation is a little bit different so I suspect that most of us will fall under the category B and therefore you'll follow my recommendation in B which is to Simply change the oil and oil filter every 5,000 Mi or 8,000 km or at least once

a year that's the most important thing to keep in mind so I really hope this video clarified all the things I talked about before which might have added some confusion by breaking into categories of a b and c and by following that I think you'll be able to keep your car in a great condition without overly spending too much money on your car let me know if you have more questions about this I would love to talk more about oil change and also maintaining things in the future but these are a really interesting topic for

me and hopefully for you as well if you like my video please give me a thumbs up make some comments ask me some questions and if you haven't done so yet would you kindly subscribe as well until next video I'm signing off for now thank you so much