Cheap engine oil can become an expensive mistake
Engine oil is one of the cheapest parts of routine maintenance. Getting it wrong, however, can leave you with a repair bill many times larger
There are plenty of places where you can save some money when maintaining a car. Engine oil probably should not be one of them.
For most of us, an oil change is fairly uneventful. You drive into a workshop, tell the mechanic what car you have and, more often than not, let them decide what goes into it. After all, if the engine sounds fine afterwards, what could possibly have gone wrong?
Quite a lot, actually.
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Engine oil spends its life somewhere we cannot see it, which makes its quality remarkably easy to ignore. Poor-quality or counterfeit oil will not necessarily make an engine explode the moment you turn the key either. Instead, the consequences can appear thousands of kilometres later, when that small saving on an oil change starts looking rather insignificant next to the repair bill.
Here are four reasons why what you pour into your engine deserves a little more attention.
1. The world's best oil is useless if the bottle is fake
This is perhaps the bigger concern when shopping for lubricant locally.
A bottle can carry a familiar logo, the correct viscosity and every specification you were looking for. None of that matters if what is actually inside is adulterated, recycled or simply not what the packaging claims.
That makes where you buy your oil almost as important as what you buy.
An authorised dealer or established retailer is a safer bet than chasing the lowest possible price from an unknown source. Check whether the cap and seal appear untouched. Look at the quality of the bottle and printing. If the manufacturer offers a QR code, scratch code or another authentication system, take the extra minute to use it.
And if a supposedly identical bottle costs suspiciously less than it does everywhere else, asking why is probably worthwhile.
None of this means you need to buy the most expensive fully synthetic oil on the shelf every time your car needs servicing. A cheaper genuine lubricant that meets the correct requirements can be a perfectly sensible choice.
What matters is much simpler: the right viscosity, the right performance specification, a reputable product and a trustworthy seller.
2. Your engine really does depend on the stuff
Calling engine oil the lifeblood of an engine sounds like something written on the back of a lubricant bottle, but there is some truth to the cliché.
Inside an engine, pistons, bearings, camshafts and the crankshaft are moving at tremendous speeds. The oil creates a protective film between these components, reducing friction and preventing metal surfaces from constantly fighting each other.
And our driving conditions are hardly kind to them. Long periods sitting in traffic, repeated stop-start driving, high temperatures and dusty roads can make life particularly difficult for an engine.
Things get even more serious with turbocharged cars. A turbocharger can spin at well over 100,000 rpm while operating in an extremely hot environment, and its bearings depend on a constant supply of suitable oil.
Poor lubrication does not necessarily kill any of these components overnight. Increased wear happens gradually, which is precisely what makes it easy to overlook.
Until, of course, something expensive gives up.
3. Bad oil can leave a mess behind
Oil does much more than make slippery things slippery.
A modern engine oil contains an additive package designed to control deposits, resist oxidation, reduce wear, protect against corrosion and keep contaminants suspended within the oil.
This is where the quality of the lubricant becomes important.
A poorly formulated or adulterated product may not provide the additive performance the engine requires. Over time, excessive deposits and sludge can form inside the engine. In severe cases, these can interfere with the small passages through which oil travels to critical components.
The result can range from accelerated internal wear to problems with components such as the valvetrain and turbocharger.
There is also a common misconception worth clearing up here. Black oil does not automatically mean bad oil. Engine oil naturally becomes darker as it collects contaminants, and its detergents and dispersants are partly there to keep those contaminants suspended.
So dipping the stick, seeing dark oil and immediately blaming the brand is not particularly useful.
4. Those letters on the bottle actually mean something
Walk into an oil shop and you will find bottles covered in things like 0W-20, 5W-30, 10W-40, API SN and API SP.
They are not there merely to make the bottle look more technical.
The first set refers to the oil's SAE viscosity grade. In simple terms, it tells you how the oil behaves at lower and higher temperatures. Your manufacturer will normally specify which viscosity or viscosities are suitable for the engine.
Then there is the API performance category. API specifications indicate the level of performance an engine oil has been designed to meet. API SP, for example, is a newer petrol-engine specification than API SN and introduces requirements relevant to modern engines.
Some carmakers also have their own oil specifications and approvals.
This distinction is important because two bottles can both say 5W-30 while meeting different performance requirements. SAE tells you about viscosity; it is not, by itself, a certificate saying that one 5W-30 is as good as every other 5W-30.
It is also why the familiar advice of putting thicker oil into an ageing engine should not automatically be taken as gospel.
Instead of guessing, check the owner's manual or do a simple Google search. The people who designed the engine have already told you what it needs.
