Testing different oils over 4 years and 1 MILLION miles

Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Ben. And we're from Gears of Gasoline. Valvoline invited us down here to their powertrain testing lab in order to get a look at these two engines that both have 500,000 miles on them a piece. Valvoline has had them on their chassis dynos for the last handful of years, just turning miles and miles every single day. Both of these engines are small little four-cylinder, 2.3 liters. They make about 280 horsepower in some Ford Explorers. The only difference between these two engines is that one of them was running Valvoline We're not going to tell you which one is which, but as you watch us tear these engines down, see if you can figure out which one is running the standard conventional and which one is running the synthetic. Let me see if I can visually identify what oil this is. So the oil change interval for these were about 10,000 miles, which is, I believe, the service interval. I can't tell what this is. No? It looks like it could be in synthetic. Yeah, that's oil. It's oil. Here, let's see if there's a difference on this one. Yep, that also looks like oil. So the first step is we're going to take all the accessories off the engine, which is all of the alternator, water pump, intake manifold, all the extra stuff before we actually get to the core of the engine. Oh, okay, we got the first glimpse inside. How do you look? I think yours looks a little darker. It does. It looks a little darker right around there. That's not oil. That's like me wiping it. Definitely shinier on this side. I would be having a much harder time with this disassembly. The other one's from John here from Valvoline. He's the technical know-how. He's helping me take this apart a bunch. This is a spotless engine compared to what I usually work on. How's the gasket surface on your coolant seal? Oh, whoa, yours looks a lot different. Pretty significant. This is not a coolant test by any means. Both engines ran the factory coolant, and it is surprising how much more, like, tarnished that this engine is with the coolant. You know, I've kind of been with the project since we purchased the Explorer's new in 2020. So we actually went with a cycle that's kind of based off of a standard cycle. We actually modified it a little bit. It's not like just flat-out cruising all the time. It's actually going down to idle and ramping up and come back down and ramping up. So it's like stop and go, like a normal person would have that experience. When we first started, we ran everything exactly how Ford specified, so 10,000 mile oil drains. You know, we were sampling every 1,000 miles. Ben, how does your belt look? I think mine's got to be the synthetic belt. No, this is definitely the synthetic one. Yeah, see, the wear from the synthetic oil on the belt is much better. Way less varnishing on mine. These are actually drive-by-wire. So we put in some voltage isolators and actually set it directly to the throttle pedal. We drive it by wire, just electronically. No drivers, just computer-controlled. I mean, I just can't believe that this has 500,000 miles on it. I don't own a single car that has like 200,000 miles on it, and they all look worse than these. Yeah, this has more mileage than all of my cars. Ben, what does your filter line look like, whatever this is? Pretty dark in there. Yeah, yours looks better than mine though. Does it? Yeah. I think you're going to see a ton of varnish on the conventional, and I think the synthetic is going to be pretty clean. All right, so it is worth noting that these engines did not go 500,000 miles without issue. One of the wastegate actuators failed on one of these engines, and they both had catalytic converters fail. So that is worth noting, but I mean, 500,000 miles, I'm surprised there's not more. Yeah, that's a turbo. That's a hefty turbo. That's a pretty big turbo. I'm most impressed by the exhaust outlet size. Right? Yeah. Pretty cool. Now, Ben, it is worth noting, I just took the turbo off, and the side of the engine is much more oily than your engine. Yes. Your engine looks like it has 50,000 miles on it, and this looks like 150. It's worth noting, though, that both of these engines had their own individual tiny little failures over the course of testing. Yours had a front seal leak, which probably explains how all this oil got flung back here. And then this one had a rear main leak. Pretty much the whole test, I never referred to what oil was in which, just to kind of keep the mystery alive, even amongst everybody here at the lab. I was really mainly the only one that knew which one was which. When we were taking them apart, I guess it kind of became apparent which one was the synthetic. You want to take off the valve cover and really see what we're working with? Let's unseal it. Okay. All right. Ready? Okay. All right. There's some tarnish. Very golden, though. But look at those cam lobes. Those look beautiful. Whoa. My gosh. That is like maroon. Right off the bat, we're pretty confident which one is. I think I know what's what. We ran them at the same time, side by side, same conditions, same temperature outside, same humidity, same fuel. Everything's the same. Only difference was the oil. You got a little more varnish, don't you? So wear on this one's looking good. Wear on this one. The wear still looks good. Yeah, it looks good. Wear looks good, but the varnish is significantly worse. So what is a downside of varnish? Why do I care that it's red as opposed to close to the OEM color? Well, it can actually insulate your parts, make them run hotter and whatnot. Okay. So it's building up like a coating, basically. Yeah, yeah. It can cause things to stick. Can that clog up? Your buckets could start sticking. And this kind of goes to like stuff gumming up. All three of these gaskets stayed on the head. My gaskets clean off. And yours came off all clean. Oh, that looks good. That's not terrible. Oh, yeah. I heard it from over here. Yeah, actually, we have some coagulation here. Again, my gasket stuck. But this is like buildup. That is pretty stark. We did extend out the drains on them, but we were sampling every thousand miles. So we kept that under control. It was very meticulous. Probably much more stringent than the average consumer would do. A lot of people don't even check their oil level. And here we are checking level every eight hours. Looks the same as the valve cover. Wow. Even the guides look good. So, I mean, even though, you know, the conventional had more varnish on it, wear was still really good. Even performance wise, it started to get a little rattly at the end. You know, it could have been. We saw that the timing chain tensioner was a little kind of stuck. Could have been better. I'm noticing it's like kind of caking up right on top of the tensioner here. And it's in the tensioner too, which I'd imagine would start affecting the functionality of the tensioner. It's just you can just see it's just caking up on top. Call it sludge. Sludge. That is... Is that the technical term? It really is. Yeah. There's a sludge rating that you do on these. Does this all look just about what you would expect for a conventional? At this mileage? Yeah. Yeah, this looks like a mirror. Honestly, I'm so impressed. I... Almost every engine that I've ever taken apart looks worse than this. Did you just pull that off? I might need a little... Are you serious? Yours is stuck? Mine's stuck. I don't know, Ben. I'm still holding out hope this one might be with the synthetic. You think? Yeah. Yeah, it's everywhere, dude. Nice. That's pretty though. Turn it. It's kind of... Yeah, you guys... It's like anodized. You've invented a new anodization technology. Didn't stick coming out. That's good. I would hope not. Easy. Even the buckets look good. I can't even tell that they've even had contact. So what we're looking at is everywhere that the metal is contacting another piece of metal, it looks fantastic. So that's where you're going to see the wear because this is turning over and it's constantly rubbing on another piece of metal. But that film of oil is what's protecting it in between. And it doesn't even look like the metal has been touching. To be fair, it doesn't look like it's been touching on this side either. Again, all the wear surfaces, even on the conventional. Right. Great. Carbon buildup on the retainers and keepers of every single exhaust valve as opposed to on the synthetic, we're assuming, synthetic engine. You can see that there's no carbon buildup on the front valve. So we do have a little on the backside here. But it's really only those two. And then it just gets much better. I'm going to catch you here in a second. Put you back into it. All that varnishing is making this more difficult. All right. Moment of truth, Thorne. All right. Let's see what we got. That's a little sticky. That looks like a normal top set pistons. I mean, it's a lot of carbon buildup, but it's 500,000 miles. Oh, yeah. It's full of oil. How about that? Ben, does yours look like an oil pan? Looks like a red oil pan. Well, mine looks like more of a yellow oil pan. They look like different engines. They... Wow. Yeah. That's nuts. It's red versus yellow. Thick bearings. Yeah. Looks good. That is so impressive. Even though we saw the synthetic perform, you know, great, conventional was still a Valvoline formulation. We made a little more varnish, a lot more varnish, but still, the wear was great. Still performing good. Perfect. All the bearings stayed. All the bearings did, too. And so this is just like a little example of bore polish. And bore polish in our testing world is those areas that are instantaneously recognizable as a mirrored finish. So when you look around, everything looks matte, and then, boom, you see that really shiny spot. There's a little bit right on the ring reversal here. A little touch of bore polish. But I mean, these engines had good combustion. Yeah. So that's why it's not crazy. Okay. Yeah. So here we're evaluating the oil pans off these two engines. We're going to use these scales. That just helps you to identify the deposits. You kind of match up the deposit. As you can see in the oil pans, I've made some crosses, if you will. In this oil pan over here, it wasn't removed at all. So it's a very hard deposit. And the deposits on the right, they were much softer so that they were easily removed. We're going to actually going to be rating the parts that are wiped. It's just under a four. And then this other oil pan here, you know, it was closer to the eight. And looking at the rest of the engine, it's going to tell the same story through all the parts. They're all pretty identical in deposits. The rough estimate rating here. I mean, you would be like in the fours with this, like going back to our varnish scale. And this one here is, you know, seven and a half. The big takeaway here is this one. You've noticed we've removed the rings and that's standard protocol. You remove the ring so that you can evaluate the deposits behind the rings. And in this piston here, the rings are stuck in its groove. That's due to the deposits forming in there. And it's kind of pinching the rings, if you will. So this second compression ring and the oil control rings are stuck, which in any testing is an automatic fail. But we just leave those in there and evaluate around them. When you have rings like this that are cold stuck, you know, it might not be such a problem right now. But in the near future, they could turn into hot stuck rings. So meaning that those rings will still be stuck in its groove while the engine's under normal operating temperatures. And when that happens, you'll start losing compression, fuel economy and decreased power. We did see more carbon deposits on the pistons for the conventional. They kind of manifested their way into having a total of seven stuck, cold stuck rings. Whereas the synthetic, it did still have one cold stuck ring. But the synthetic was significantly better. One of the engines had a turbo wastegate failure. So we ended up replacing the whole turbo due to that failure at 200,000 miles. Now, if you look at these compressor wheels, can you guess which one has 500,000 miles on it? Which one has 300,000 miles on it? This one here only has 300,000 miles on it. And it's actually worse deposits. A huge thank you to Valvoline for having us down here to check out the culmination of what has been literally years of rigorous and meticulous testing by you guys. And I would say that the results are pretty stark and speak for themselves. Yeah, this is literally the oil that was used in this engine, Valvoline Extended Protection. And Ben, I am so glad that I'm already running this in my engines at home because I want my engine to look like this if I can make it 500,000 miles. Yeah, this engine looks like it hasn't been run hardly at all. Like it's so clean inside. It's crazy. I think you could throw this thing back together and keep it going. As a matter of fact, maybe we should do that. You want to put it back together, John? Let's do it. Yeah. And by me, you mean them, right? I'm not helping at all. I'm not lifting a finger. Wow, OK.