Most auto manufactures recommend that you change your motor oil every 3 thousand miles. The service stations will tell you it’s a must at 3,000. Our country could save millions of barrels a year if these guys would tell the truth about oil changing intervals. The truth is you don’t need to change your oil as frequently as they say.
Just think about this… On average a normal person drives 12,000 miles per year. If you followed Jiffy Lubes recommendation you would have to change your oil 4 times per year. That would be 5 quarts times 4 changes, or 20 quarts per year per car (not including semi trucks and construction equipment). There are 160 million registered cars in the USA so that would make 3.2 billion quarts of oil per year we use for oil changes. Now if we change the interval to say every 6,000 miles, which would be half the oil changes making our dependence reduced by 1/2 of the 3.2 billion quarts, or 1.6 billion quarts.
Now let me try to figure this one out…1.6 billion quarts equals 400 million gallons and there are 42 gallons in a barrel (originally I thought it was 55, but that’s a drum) so, the total savings would be 9,523,809 barrels of oil. Oil is trading at around $70/ barrel, so we would save $666,666,666.67 (that’s weird how it’s the devils number).
This is for the USA. Just imagine if Canada and Mexico was in the equation.
What do you think?
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My car’s manual has two maintenance schedules: one for “Severe” conditions, one for “normal”. I could almost get by with “Normal” except that for half the year I meet the criteria for “Severe”, in that the temperature gets (or stays) below 32 degrees F. So the half of the year that it’s above freezing I can go with the “Normal” schedule, which is oil change every 6,000 miles. Severe calls for oil changes every 3,000 miles.
Part of the equation has to be the quarts added due to burn off, I have to add a quart every 1000-2000 miles due to burn off, I will have to do this more I would guess…
The more oil changes you have (every 3k) the better your engine will be in the long run. You like your car then change the oil frequently. Paying m ore than 25 dollars for an oil change is ridiculous though. It s weird how the price of changing oil goes up. Next year it will 50 dollars to cange your oil.
Chuck on March 24th, 2009 at 8:01 pm | Link