What About Motor Oil Additives

by admin on April 8, 2010

Should you pour after market additives into your motor oil?  You could be risking the health of your engine if you do!  Remember slick 50?

There are a ton of detailed reports and FTC complaints and lawsuits against companies producing things like Slick 50.  For example the manufacturer of slick 50 lost (they had to pay millions of dollars) against an FTC when investigated for claims of reduced engine wear and improved engine performance.

For fun just search the manufacturer or name of an oil additive your are considering over at http://www.ftc.gov/ (you might be surprised)

Proving for yourself that an aftermarket oil additive is actually doing something for you in your engine in nearly impossible unless you have access to full blown engine shop with dyno.

Because performance improvements are hard to demonstrate it is easy for these fly by night companies to pop up with the next new miracle additive that will give you 37% more power with engine protection that lasts forever.  B.S.

The reality:  most of the additives that offer a real performance benefit and a real protection benefit are already in the quality motor oils on the market.  Formulating an excellent motor oil is no simple task.  There is a benefit and cost to adding each additive to the mix.

What this means is you can’t just dump some aftermarket additive into your oil and expect a benefit.  In fact I would put the probability of decreasing the effectiveness of your engine oil at much greater than 50%.  Don’t do it.

Buy good oil and change it at the intervals in your manual or the interval guaranteed by the oil manufacturer.  I know it is easy to say just use good oil but difficult to sort out who actually makes good oil?  Go here to learn about all the synthetic motor oils.

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