Oil Change Interval (OCI): Are the Dealerships Ruining Your Engine? – Part 2
This is part 2 of this series. Click here to read part 1.
My car has just hit 20k miles and so now I am back with an update!
As I said at the end of my Part 1 post, I changed my oil at 10k miles and planned to wait 10k miles to change it again.
My last change was at the 10,457 mile mark and this time I waited until 19,284 miles. I thought this was close enough to the 10k mark and due to the fact that I needed to go in to fix a small issue, I decided to just go ahead and get the oil change. Once I got home and did the actual math and realized that this was actually a change interval of 8,827 miles, I was a little upset. In my head I had estimated the numbers and thought it would be closer to 10k. Oh well.
Also, at about the 18,000 mile mark, I checked my oil level with the dipstick and saw that it was a bit low so I added 1/4 a quart of Castrol Syntec 5W/40. To my knowledge this is the exact oil that the dealership uses.
One big difference between my first oil change in Part 1 and this one was not just the fact that I was waiting longer to change the oil but also that I had gotten an APR Stage 1 flash done to my ECU. Throughout this whole OCI I was running my car with the 93 Octane mode which is the highest performance mode you can set without having to buy race gas (100 Octane). I was very curious to see if the extra performance boost from this tune would affect how often I had to change the oil.
I sent my sample in to Blackstone. I mentioned that I added a quarter of a quart of oil (as you can see in the report) and waited patiently and here are the results…
*Clicking on the image will take you to a higher def .png version.
Are you surprised by the results? Because I sure am! As you can read in the report, Blackstone Labs seems to think my engine passes with flying colors and the TBN is even better than my first oil change when I changed it at 5k miles AND didn’t have a performance tune! I asked them what they thought about extending the OCI to 10k and as you can see, Blackstone Labs thinks this will be no problem at all given the results of this oil analysis.
So there you have it. 10k mile OCI’s are the way to go! Just make sure you check your oil levels with the dipstick and add oil as needed.






