The messy old days! Both our very first car, a 1941 Chevrolet Stylemaster Deluxe and my first car, a 1948 Chevrolet stovebolt 6, had these external (optional at extra cost) oil filters. They were mounted in a canister on the side of the engine and the element had a litle pull ring. I used old rags to wipe the crud out of the canister.
Driving habits play a part in oil life as well. I just had my oil changed yesterday and I had just a little over 1300 miles on my car. Owner’s manual calls for 4 months or 5k miles for severe usage, and I’d say 2 miles(one way) to work and 4 miles to the store once a week qualifies. The dealership service writer told me they recommend 6 months(the OM’s normal schedule), but they still got me in.
Take into consideration that some cars are going to direct injection(my car) and that may contaminate oils a little more than normal methods
…and it was probably between the Ford lawyers and accountants who figured out that it would be cheaper to handle the lawsuits than fix the designs.
What actually disturbs me in statements like “the company wouldn’t put it out of they didn’t think it was good” is that its just obviously so not true. I do not have such faith.
The problem with Ford is that Ford KNEW before the first Pinto was ever sold that there was the potential of the gas tanks exploding if they were rear-ended (internal documents proved that out).
And your point is what exactly?
Every gas tank ever built has a “potential for exploding” in a collision. Even the best gas tanks can probably be built even better if money is no object. Where do you draw the line? What level is good enough. Remember that this car was designed to sell for under $3000. Make every component of the car $2 better and soon you have a $5000 or maybe even a $10,000 car. Try selling that in 1972.
I claimed that the vast majority of Pintos never exploded, I’ll take that claim one step farther, I bet that the vast majority of Pintos that were involved in collisions never exploded.
As a former auto engineer, I can give you a couple of reasons why you should trust the engineers of your vehicle: The database on automobiles covers billions of iterations, so there is lots of supporting information to assist in the design of new components, as well as the continued use of others. The size of the filter isn’t as big an issue as you might think. The oil goes THROUGH the filter, so it is normally a question of the speed of the oil movement and the surface area of the filter media that counts. Newer engines run hotter (this is a good thing—it’s a thermal device after all) so the oil has to move through the system faster to collect heat, a major function of your oil that most people are unaware of. You also may find that your car manual specifies the use of synthetic oil. If it does, definitely use synthetic. It costs more, but you can extend oil changes very safely to 12,000 miles for average driving. Because these engines run hotter, the danger of sludging requires use of synthetic oils.
Secondly, the oil pan doesn’t need to hold all that oil. In fact, some cars (Corvette is one) are no longer using the pan as the oil reservoir and using a “scavenge” system instead. The pan is not a good place for the oil anyway since a high oil level will interfere with the crankshaft operation and it has to be kept from sloshing around while you take high speed turns, etc., and if you happen to hit one of those chunks of frozen slush in the winter, it can easily put a leak in your pan that will cost you an engine. Reducing the pan also allows the engine to sit lower, giving the designers a lower and more fuel efficient profile. In the old days, cars relied on the piston rods to dip into the oil and splash it around the cylinders, but we’ve gone beyond that.
As for standardizing gas fill, I’m with you. But unfortunately for the engineers, the MARKETING GUYS and the styling department usually get to over-rule good engineering decisions like standardizing the fill point. But usually, it is a much more important issue: During the many crashes that a vehicle undergoes during its design, testing must show that the vehicle can withstand crashes from many directions, as well as roll overs, without any spillage that would cause a fire. The location of many parts not visible to you will affect the location with the best resistance to leakage in a crash. Sometimes, in the interest of safety, the filler neck has to be on one side or the other. Other times, it’s because auto engineers are just perverse and want to make you write into Car Talk.
Ok - I give. You’re obviously right. The Pinto problem was purely a fiction invented by lawyers. Come to think of it anything bad you’ve ever heard about any company is the same. All hail the corporation. The only thing on the planet that is a paragon of moral virtue.
And of course, lawyers are all shining knights in armor, paragons of virtue and good, working only for the benefit of society at great personal sacrifice, refusing even to accept payment for their services. Sort of like Batman.
On my Toyota, there is an ARROW on the instrument panel pointing to the LEFT that says FUEL DOOR! It’s aimed at people who forget which side their gas cap is on.
If I rent that same car in England, where they drive on the left, the gas cap is on the…RIGHT! The reason is mainly technical; it is simple to run the release cable in a straight line front to back to release the cap. To string it across to the other side gets much more complicated.
On American cars with no locking gas caps the center filler neck made a lot of sense. I had 4 cars like that; a Pontiac, an Olds and two Chevies.
Definitely Severe Service! My mother-in-law used to drive that few miles, and even with better oils, you need 3 oil changes per year at least. Short trip driving, especially in cold weather, builds up condensation, sludge, and in the days of carburetors, raw gas in the crankcase. Water and gasoline are very poor lubricants.
Older manuals advised you to take a fast highway trip of about 20 miles or so to drive off this condensation. An old Chrysler manual advised to change oil as often as 500 miles if all driving was short trips in cold weather!
The Pinto gas tanks were no better or worse than those on other compacts. Their position, right behind a rather flimsy back bumper, made them hazardous. Once the design was approved, it would have been very expensive to change it.
On the new Honda Fit, to get maximum space in a crash resistant car, the fuel tank is under the front seat! The last vehicle I saw that on was a World War II military jeep.
“And of course, lawyers are all shining knights in armor”
Oy. You can’t win an argument by getting ridiculous. No one said anything at all anywhere to defend lawyers. The point is - as it originally was - that blind faith in corporations, as if they will do no wrong out of some self-preservation calculus is uncalled for. It is quite obvious that they often do wrong - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not and sometimes something in between. By trying to shift the previous comments to a defense of lawyers I’ll assume that you have nothing left to say.
Cigroller, I don’t think that the Pinto is a good example - it’s too old. The incidents in question happened over 35 years ago. A review in 1991 indicates that there were not nearly as many rear-end accident induce explosions as the media said.
http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf
The case was quite stale by 1991; I don’t think Ford paid the author to cook the data with their spices. Maybe you could try Toyota. but they seem to have responded, too, if a bit later than some would like.
Oy. Again. I just pulled the Pinto off the top of my head. It wasn’t a significant part of the issue. The real question is this: why would anyone assume that if a company does something it must be ok? I don’t.
This was about the GM OLM. I don’t assume it is problem free just b/c GM put it out and keeps using it.
And even if you do want to talk the Pinto for some reason - it had a serious problem; Ford knew about it, and it hit the market anyway. That is the way it was.
In the case of OLM I’m sure it is perfect for anyone who either leases or trades in every 4-5 years. I don’t trust it if you want to actually maximize the engine’s longevity. I don’t lease and I don’t trade in. I buy a car and I keep it as long as it is possible to keep it on the road safely & reliably. So I ignore the OLM.
That’s how a family member killed their Crown Vic. 1 mile to church. 1 mile to the grocery store. 1 mile to the post office. 5 years of no oil changes, figuring they weren’t “using up” their oil.
Needless to say the car developed a nasty main bearing knock and was done for.
The Pinto problem wasn’t invented by lawyers, but it was blown out of proportion by them.
NHTSA linked 27 deaths to the Pinto’s problems. By comparison, they’ve found 55 fatalities in 93-04 Jeep Grand Cherokee gas tank fires so far.
And of course, by panicking over the Pinto, people may have made a rash decision. The Pinto’s overall fatality rate (all causes) was 310 per million vehicles in 1975-1976. That’s a bit higher than the Gremlin (295) or the Vega (299), but lower than the Toyota Corolla (313), Datsun 510 (317), Volkswagen Beetle (374) or Datsun 1200 (405).
Here’s some excerpts from a Chrysler engineer of transmissions on another forum:
Nobody loses their job for product blunders. On the contrary, you get respected for coming up with a quick fix and likely to get sooner promotions and bigger pay raises than someone who toils in obscurity and never has to “save the day” by correcting for their own blunders.
…
Purchasing found cheaper suppliers for some seals, etc. in the transmission and took the supplier’s word that they would be just as good, so they never told engineering about the change.
It doesn’t always work out that you hit a home run on the first pitch. When the development program started to fall behind, transmissions built in a pilot run at the transmission plant were shipped to engineering, torn down, retrofitted with parts that were not available for the pilot builds due to late changes and reassembled. Sure, the latest parts were tested, but transmissions built at the transmission plant were dirtier inside, causing problems, but this wasn’t found out because the they were all rebuilt in a nice clean engineering lab before testing.
An engineering evaluation in the fleet of corporate lease vehicles was canceled as part of budget cuts.
Proving ground testing was running behind schedule, so vehicles get tested 24/7, so they never cool down and show you things like cold fluid flow problems, long term corrosion, material degradation over time, etc.
It’s a lot like: How do a bunch of guys who were the best in their High School football teams go on to college and the best from the college teams go on to the NFL and yet you still get a team like the Detroit Lions? I blame the manglement!
…
To the investor, the company is their stock prospectus.
To the politician, the company is a source of jobs for his/her constituency and the tax revenue they produce.
To the general public, the company is the general reputation of products it puts out.
To the customer, the company is the personal experience owning the last product he bought.
To the employee, the company is a community of people who share the same employer.
From the inside, you know what you achieved, you know the conditions you worked under to achieve it and you know what it could have been with a little help from the bastards on top. There is such a split between the executives and the employees that, instead of being like an extended family led by the matriarchs & patriarchs, it is more like a feudal serfdom, with a dozen haves calling the shots over thousands of have-nots.
It’s unimportant what you say you need to do your job. Just go out there and do it with what resources you’ve been given. The struggle for what meager resources there are binds some employees together, like within a combat platoon. It pits other employees against each other. Overall, it makes the employees like an extended family, with functional and dysfunctional relationships.
You look at your company’s products and you see the jewels and you see the bird poop, but you know all the inside stories as to how those products got to be what they are.
“Bob knew how to get rid of that road noise, but they didn’t want to spend the money.”
“Floyd told them how many durability test vehicles he needed, but they gave him less than half and then cut the test drivers overtime budget as well.”
“Ron sure learned the hard way about zero clearance motors, but he got the timing belt durability up to 100,000 miles by some clever engineering and by finding a more capable supplier, becoming the industry expert on timing belts.”
“Maury saved a lot of “piece cost” money with his innovative transmission design, but it was sensitive to component variations and in the end it bit us in the ass in warranty claims and customer dissatisfaction.”
“Ken told them there were intrinsic design issues with the system, but nobody was willing to support the recommendations from his 23 page Design FMEA because they didn’t want to go up the ladder with a request for more money. Now customers are left cursing a nameless engineer whenever they experience the system failures he predicted and the warranty claim costs are multiples of what it would have cost to utilize a more robust design, let alone the ill will against the company the failures have created.”
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Got to let it go. Too early to start drinking today.
The real question you should be asking is why do you believe you are SMARTER than the engineers who design cars and trucks that sell by the thousands every year?
In some countries, there are laws that dictate that the fuel filler must be located on the side of the car that the operator can safely add fuel on the side of the road without being exposed to traffic. I think that makes great sense. Who wants to run the risk of getting smacked by a passing idiot on a cell phone?
Where that isn’t a law, then typically the fuel filler is put on the same side of the car as the drivers seat, so refueling the car is quicker and easier. Most domestic cars have their fuel doors on the drivers side.
Now, here’s the real question:
Have you ever heard of a single engine failure where the owner had ALWAYS replaced the oil and filter when the OLM told them to change it, while using the recommended oil type, on a vehicle that hasn’t had modifications done to it?
Ever?
I’m waiting.
BC.
“I had not thought of reading the manual for the recommended oil change interval and comparing the mileage to the OLM.”
In some owner’s manuals, they tell you to use the OLM. Period. I don’t know if GM is among the companies that do this, but Honda does it.
“I just pulled the Pinto off the top of my head. It wasn’t a significant part of the issue.”
That’s reasonable.
“This was about the GM OLM. I don’t assume it is problem free just b/c GM put it out and keeps using it.”
I’m just a sample of one, but it has worked well for us over 7 years and 100,000 miles. And California uses it as a result of a test they ran in their motor pool. Cali actually evaluated the engines and found that the OLM worked as advertised. If you don’t want to take their mechanic’s word for it, fine.
No, I have not heard of any failures to date. However, these OLMs have not been around long enough to get a good picture of how well they work in the long term.
Generally, I’m in favor of such an item since it will make more drivers change their oil regularly since the light will be on.
Personally, though I would change oil long before the 10% remaining sign goes on, since I would want the car engine to outlast the rest of the car, rather than just the warranty, or 100,000 miles!