Don’t you trust your or your mechanic’s inspection of a used vehicle before you buy one? A decent fiber optic cylinder inspection tool can show you if there is engine damage from a lack of oil.
If the manufacturer recommends 10,000 mile oil changes using synthetic oil, and the oil was changed every 10,000 miles using the right oil, I wouldn’t let irrational fear get the best of me.
Oh yeah, they all do that…
;-]
My powertrain warranty was 80,000 miles. The better half’s car is still in its 100,000 mile warranty. We’ve both changed our oil a lot more than 3 times. 
And if they all did that, they’d all know what they were seeing, right?
They all pull a valve cover and oil pan to inspect for sludge, don’t they?
CSA 
If you have the camera, you only have to pull a spark plug. I can’t be the only one who does this on used vehicles, can I?
…and all you have to look for are the crosshatch patterns on the cylinder walls.
When did this get difficult?
When you insinuated that a mechanic told to “check out this used car” would probably do a bore-scope inspection…
;-]
I can’t imagine paying for an inspection from someone who wouldn’t do a bore scope inspection as part of the job. If that makes me an idiot, I’ll not dispute it.
Nobody’s saying you’re an idiot . . . you’re the one that brought it up
However, I seriously doubt that most paid pre-purchase vehicle inspections include a bore scope inspection of the cylinder walls
It’s not the expense of the tool, as there are plenty of relatively inexpensive scopes available now
It’s the fact that it’s . . . IMO . . . above and beyond what the typical inspection includes
A good inspection might include road test, brake inspection, put the car on the rack, dtc scan, and maybe hook up the vacuum gauge and compression gauge. And those last two are probably omitted on many inspections
But if you want to be sure, you might have to perform your own inspection and reach your own conclusions
I suppose asking the mechanic if he uses a boroscope to inspect the engine could be a discriminator in choosing who you pay to check the car out.
Gonna be way more than $100 for a PPI with a borescope…