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In Reply to: Oil Change seems way to long (m)... posted by Noah on September 09, 2001 at 23:45:28:
I am still from more of the old school, and until I acquired my 2000 528 I was always using conventional oil and changing every 3/m miles fairly religiously.
I just hit 12,500 on my car and only today did the yellow oil change light come on.
I changed the oil at just under 7/m since it seemed that the car would go to about 12,000+ before I would get the computer go-ahead.
My issue is that I live in Los Angeles - I average about 20mpg in a lot of city driving, and my speeds are certainly not a lot of clear highway travel. I was told that the computer takes your driving style, etc. into consideration. But if that's the case, I find it hard to believe that in big city driving that it's ok to go to 12,500+ miles before a change.
I understand that the max mileage is around 15/m with the computer - yet it seems that my driving conditions should warrant a change not reaching 80% or greater of that of the maximum.
I plan to stick with my changes around 6/m and hope to run the car a long time.
Not really a question here, just a statement.
The way the system accounts for your driving style is by tracking how much fuel you use. The SI interval is based "strictly" on fuel usage. Each car is assigned a base amount of fuel 9IE 1500 litres), and when you have burned through that much fuel the SI orange indicator comes on.
The fuel usage is measured by the engine computer - cumulative timing of the injector pulse durations.
In theory you could get the SI light on and never drive a single mile - if you let it idle through teh fuel amount (sort of difficult to do unless you had a local fuel supply.)
Cheers
Jim Cash