oil weight usage

[qship96]

Interesting report on oil weight usage by different areas of the world.....as you could guess, North America uses the lightest weight oils, driven by Government fuel economy mandates.....makes one wonder if we should go thicker to extend engine life at the expense of a few tenths MPG?


Linky to report and graphs of consumption by area and grade http://www.instituteofmaterials.com/collection.htm

PS.....click on pie charts in the link to expand the charts to see % of different weight oils used !!!!!!

[BadQ45t]

I don't know if I would do that, 5-30 in the SF Bay Area works quite well on my Q and my X-Terra. I run 10-40 in my VG30 84' 300ZX as I ran 20-50 in San Diego, Phoenix and LA before...that engine seems like it really needs the thicker oil. I would only run 0-30 if I lived in the cold, but I rarely see anything below 36 and anything over 85.

[qship96]

I have run either 5w-30 or 10w-30 exclusively till I hit 200K- since then I have been playing with the same and occasionally 0w-30 in winter and 10w-40 in summer.....current fill is a 5w-40 Redline. I also just went up in weight to 1qt 75w-140 and 1/2 qt 75w-90 RL in the differential. My thoughts are the tolerances must be getting larger with the high miles, so why not increase weights a little?

[OwnerCS]

Honda suggests 5w20 in the US where outside of the US it is 5W30.

Just one of the regulation based things like Ethanol -- that helps the auto industry.

Just look at the time table for increased Ethanol utilization in the following statement.

"The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-140, H.R. 6) amended and increased the RFS, requiring 9 billion gallons of renewable fuel use in 2008, stepping up to 36 billion gallons by 2022."

Charts are on this site.

http://www.ethanol.org

If E10 isn't enough, it looks like there is a movement to roll out E15.

http://www.ethanol.org/magazine/index.php?id=110

[Lokim]

[quote="If E10 isn't enough, it looks like there is a movement to roll out E15.

http://www.ethanol.org/magazine/index.php?id=110[/quote]

God help us!

[lino]

I'm lucky where I am. We don't have 93 octane but our 91 octane doesn't have ethanol.