Time to Change Oil: Regular Vs. Synthetic

Today I want to discuss another oil issue. Imagine the situation like this. It is time to change to oil and you take your car to the auto service. The next day you get the car back and drive it for a year.

A year later you wake up with some strange feeling and go to read the user’s manual of your car. You find out it was filled with synthetic oil when sold, but at the service station they’ve poured a regular one. It looks like you’ve been diving with the wrong oil for a year! You call the dealership of the car manufacturer and ask whether the change of the oil type might affect the car’s performance, and they say it can. Then you call the auto service and they claim that it doesn’t matter. Who’s right in this case?

In fact, the change of the oil is not likely to cause much damage in a year, but in the long run it might affect the wear rate of the engine components. 1 year is such small a period to ruin the engine completely, so I would say that there is nothing to worry about with the engine.

Yet, there is one thing to worry about – the auto service. To tell you the truth, the idea of the professionals doing their job actually clashes with the common sense when such things happen.

If they are the change oil in an Audi, they have to consult the Audi’s recommendations, if it is GM, then – GM’s. Unless they do their job properly they shouldn’t be trusted. Oil change must be done according to car manufacturer’s recommendations, but not to what they feel like doing.

Moreover, such a dramatic mistake can affect the car warranty. If the car was designed to run on synthetic oil it should be synthetic and not any other type of oil.

At the same time the question about the service station remains open. If the type of the oil is not specified the general practice is to replace it with regular mineral oil. And it might be your own error that you hadn’t specified the oil type before giving the car to the experts.

So, what is the major conclusion we can arrive at from the situation? When you need to change oil, go only to a reliable service center and always specify the type of oil your car is designed to run on.

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