2011 X5 35i Service Indicator over 20K -- really???

[Penguin]

Give it another five years and BMW will say oil is a lifetime fluid with no level check or filling port!

[JCL]

There already is no (mechanical) level check. There will still be a filling port for first fills.

Not sure if it will be five years or not, but there are composite oil pans being developed now with lifetime filters built into them.

On heavy industrial equipment, dialysis machines are commonly used to clean lubricating or hydraulic fluids instead of replacing them. Combined with a top-up of oil additives, I can see that migrating to passenger vehicles. Oil never stops being slippery, it it can be renewed then why should it be thrown away?

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by JCL

Oil never stops being slippery, it it can be renewed then why should it be thrown away?

It can be recycled.


The problem with the "lifetime" systems, is that somebody designs the system with a particular "Lifetime" in mind. When you get a lot of these systems in a vehicle, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the cost of renewing these systems becomes prohibitive.

You have read of vehicles going 1 or 2 million miles by people who take meticulous care of them. When we get all these "lifetime" systems, you will not hear of them again, e.g., you'll throw away the entire vehicle, not just the old oil. I'm not sure that's a net gain.

My 2005 Focus has a "Lifetime" air filter. "Lifetime" is about 150,000 miles, depending upon how dusty it gets. The replacement filter is $450, plus a fair bit of labor.

So vehicles are moving towards the toaster model -- throw it away and replace it, rather than fix it, when it gets to the end of it's "Lifetime."

I'm not sure that's an ecological or resource-conserving approach, IMHO.

But that's just my opinion... perhaps I'm just not changing with the times as everything gets the label "No User Serviceable Parts Inside."

[JCL]

Recycling usually involves re-refining.

I was referring to on-board cleaning, followed by a top-up of additives, so that it doesn't have to be disposed of.

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by JCL

Recycling usually involves re-refining.

I was referring to on-board cleaning, followed by a top-up of additives, so that it doesn't have to be disposed of.

Sorta like the old toilet paper filter theory?

The problem with that is that oil loses viscosity due to shear, and pumping up the viscosity by adding more and more viscosity improvers, without removing the lower viscosity "broken" molecular strings, just sounds like a bad idea to me.

But, few things are impossible...

[JCL]

Agreed that it isn't as simple as it might be.

But if we consider that we used to change oil at 3000 miles, and that we are now going 7 times that distance on a first change (per the OP), then taking it another 7 times would make it effectively 'lifetime', similar to your Focus. Doesn't seem beyond the sphere of imagination.

That won't help the people who want to go one million miles, but I think that helping 1,000 vehicles go 1,000 miles further in their vehicle's lifetime (on average) has the same societal benefit.