I rarely make an opinon without some facts at hand. In this case, a vehicle which I had personal experience with, a year long job looking after pol stores in the military, and 4 years handling ground equipment at a very busy airport shaped my thoughts.
Nobody disputes that synthetic oil is "better". I just proved that regular mineral oil is "good enough" for an old slow-moving delivery van that gets lots of highway driving. Is that so hard to accept?
I also proved that there is no environmental penalty from using regular mineral oil instead of synthetic. Is that really a punch to the gut?
And I posited that the costs of getting regular oil changes over the life of a vehicle is rather less important than making sure the tire pressure is regularly monitored, that the driving habits are more regulated, that tires are changed from summer to winter tires with alactrity...you know....the basic stuff. Regular maintenance including oil changes, lubrication, fluids replentishment, filter changes, are the magic wand which results in long life to a vehicle. Does this make me an old fuddy duddy?
Regarding compatability issues....THAT, I have experience with!
I have scraped out more than one sump (3 actually) full of what looked like black jello created by some bozo who topped up the motor generator set with whatever engine oil came to hand.....I couldn't "prove" it was technician maintenance error or that it was synthetic being added to top up an engine filled with mineral oil, it might have been two different brands of synthetic. The manufacturerers were quick to NOT return my calls and there are a LOT of different oils on a base. Somebody messed up, not the oil's fault. But then, how do you know what's in there when you are 200 miles away from home and there is nary a drop on the stick? The guy put in a can of oil! This little error was pretty mild compared to the bearing failures which resulted in synthetic greases being used in grease guns instead of the axle grease which was already filling the bearings. Fires resulted there. For four years as I worked in the ground handling section, I cursed the companies who were always coming up with the next best thing, and I really wanted somebody to come up with some standardization. I think if we had simply decided to just go "synthetic" things would have been much better.
These references support your contention, (and mine too) however a close reading of them indicates a strong use of the words "may result in longer intervals",and "unsuitable for break-in periods" and "incompatible with conventional motor oil", and so forth. I dont believe that I said anything other than that!
I am awfully conservative when it comes to mechanical stuff, and can give many more examples of snags and defects which were found when the vehicle was in for a "regular oil change", any one of which would have had much more costly results than would have been saved by extending maintenance intervals.
So, as I said before, we are in more agreement than otherwise. Especially now that the world is running out of oil, we have to look at a lot of different ways to do things. The idea of a delivery van going to the junk yard after only half a million kilometers may well be a joke in a decade or so, as may be the concept of a delivery van at all! The idea of "waste oil" is already an oxymoron, and the electrical transportation age is only just begun! We might in our life time see goods transported from city to dity by pneumatic tubes, or moving roads or sidewlks. Or something none of us predicted. One thing we can be certain of is that things are NOT going to stay the same.
And Andy, your comment about me staying on this track stings a little, perhaps I stay on this track because I have seen the results of trying to drive my train on the gravel.
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If it was easy anybody could do it.
