The quiet killer of modern vehicle engines!

Have you ever wondered why an A-grade mechanic would tell you that your car engine can be likened to the ‘engine’ of the human body?

Here’s the connection: as you know, just as you need good blood circulating through your system to remain healthy and perform at your best, your car depends on the equivalent – good oil – so the better the oil the better the car’s performance, economy and reliability. What you may not know though is that today’s more modern motor cars – those less than 10 years old – are more likely to suffer from ‘old age’ oil sludge problems than cars many years their senior.

Why?

It’s because the advantages of achieving superior fuel economy through the advanced engineering of younger cars can be largely offset by the higher risk of damage to the engine unless the newer car’s oil is changed more often than what’s required for much older style engines. Stop-start city driving and regular short trips are taking their toll on younger vehicles. They are generally designed with smaller sumps that reduce oil capacity and make it harder for the oil to meet manufacturers’ extended log book service schedules.

Vehicle workshops are seeing more and more evidence of badly damaged car engines. Just as our own blood vessels can develop life threatening narrowing and hardening of the arteries through lazy poor diets, our car engines accumulate sludge. This build up occurs when the incorrect type of engine oil is used at services or scheduled services are missed. Sometimes the selection of unsuitable oil for a particular type of engine can be as bad as not changing the oil at all!

Most car manufacturers are using variable valve timing systems which run inside the engine and rely on a constant supply of clean oil at full pressure. Sludge build up can affect more than just compression performance and economy; it has the potential to block oil supply to the cylinder head resulting in camshaft seizure and total engine failure. That’s extremely expensive to fix and in some cases the vehicle could be a write-off.

To avoid the risk of this happening to your vehicle Abbotts Auto Care provides our personal guarantee that our workshops use only the highest quality Australian-made Penrite lubricants and the correct specified oil for your vehicle. With Penrite’s 85 year-old history of first class product development we choose what we consider as the superior quality oil for our customers. This assures peace of mind. The secret of success for engine longevity of course is to service your vehicle on time every time.

Importantly, because the engine oil sludge issue is without doubt the most important warning signal we have given in our newsletters, we recommend that you share a copy of this information with your family, close friends and neighbours that you know would want to avoid a potentially devastating financial drain. In short, if your vehicle engine gives up, the replacement cost factor is usually beyond most people.