Wow, 980,000 Miles On A Honda CRV and Still Going Strong

I have been around a lot of car owners in my life and the ones that had cars that lasted the longest are always from Toyota or Honda. I have noticed a few things that almost all the vehicles with over 300K had in common:

Most were driven in dry places with low humidity and low rain fall.
The vehicles where driven consistently on lots of medium and long drives, very little city driving.
The owners are not lead foots or wild drivers, they keep a fairly constant speed
They mostly drove on good roads.
They used good coolant in the engine. (One guy swore this was the magic sauce)

The odd part was whenever I asked them the secret of how they got so many miles with almost no problems I got mixed answers on oil and transmission fluid. Some changed it regularly and swear by one particular brand and others said they changed it whenever they felt like getting it done which seemed to be rarely and they did not care about the brand of oil. I got the oil is oil lecture on one occasion.


Rob

fubarnow said:

Well, considering most oil is made in very few locations
and most of it is good quality--Oil is Oil if you know when to Change it.
If you run dino and don't change it for 10 to 15K you're asking for trouble
unlike Synthetics. In the end, oil is oil.

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Very true, but Castrol certainly had a lot of people fooled throughout the 80s and 90s.
You also have a lot of older people who think that frequent oil changes are just a scam invented by the oil companies. I have seen people do a lot more than 15K with their oil but for me it is not something that I need to take word of mouth on. I have felt the difference that fresh oil makes in the way my engines behaves and sounds. I have also seen oil that had done about 20K emptied out of an oil pan and it was mostly a chocolate sludge, it had taken in a lot of water and dirt, It probably shortened the guys engine life in half.

Old thick oil would be the death of something like the 1.5T engine with it's tight tolerances but I also think that plays into why normal OD is not an issue with the 1.5T. Honda used the thinnest engine oil you can buy, I think that the engine would happily run on oil even thinner if it was available. I believe that normal OD probably keeps the oil still in the optimal viscosity range for this engine. Those who put in 5W-20 might actually be putting the engine way out of spec.
If Honda thought that normal OD was going to be an issue they could have easily just used 5W-30 instead on 0W-20.