Please note that an oil change should be done either at 2K miles or when the Oil-Life meter comes on.
I know some non-savvy people change their synth oil at 5K miles but that defeats the purpose, like adding chocolate wedding cakes on your salad. Reason being the viscosity of oil degrades after 1000 miles, so your 5W-40 oil is going to be more like a 5W-20 oil in short time, synth or otherwise, and your hot-weather protection will suffer. Synth oil also picks up pollutants of engine parts grinding together like any oil so it'll be chock full of metal filings, just slower slightly than non-synth because it has far less pollutants and carbon particles at the onset. By the time you're at 5K miles, you might as well have purchased the far cheaper dino-blood oil and changed it at 1K miles, 5 times, which would have produced the -same results.-
Save your engine, change your synth oil regularly.
What??? That makes no sense at all. Besides the fact that with the Synth oil, the Oil Life Monitor typically will not kick in until about 7,000-8,000 miles. There is absolutely NO reason to change your oil at anything less than 3k miles. In my ION Redline, I have Synth oil, and 61,000 miles now. Have changed the oil regularly at 3,000 mile intervals. No problems at all. I had a '94 SL1 before that. It used 'dino' oil, and I changed that every 5,000 miles. I had the car from 25,000 to just over 100,000 miles and everything in the engine was running just as good as new still. Even at 100,000 miles on the engine, changing the oil at 5,000 mile intervals, the oil still came out looking very good.
90% of people who KNOW cars (I'm talking the guys who tear down and build up engines every single day, the ones who custom build monster engines for just about any make/model you can think of, i.e. Mallett) will even tell you that the 3,000 mile interval for 'dino' oil is definitely the short end of the spectrum and mostly a tactic to make the oil companies more money.
If you NEED to replace Synth oil every 2,000 miles, then why does Mobil 1 specifically say on the bottle to change it at 5,000 mile intervals?? Mobil is not going to suggest you over-use their product. So you know that Mobil has to be good for AT LEAST 5,000 miles.
/endrant
A lot of dealerships started having trouble with the amount they were charging for the Synthetic Oil changes when the ION Redline came out. First thing I would do is ask if they'll let you bring in your own oil. If you do that, they shouldn't be charging you more than $25 for the filter and labor. With ION RL, dealerships originally argued that you actually had to MOVE the Supercharger out of the way in order to reach the oil filter, hence why they tried to charge so much. This was not the case, and it pretty much just came down to the techs not really knowing the best way to do the service. There's got to be a better way to change the oil in the SKY than by removing the Intercooler first. Like I said, ask them what they're charging for the filter and labor. If it's more than $25, then they aren't doing something the easiest way.
