Does anyone know if there is a correlation between mileage and % oil life for a 2012 Fit? In other words, if the maintenance minder shows 100% oil life, what does that equal in miles? 5000 miles, 7500 miles, 10000 miles? How about 50%? Would that be half what the mileage is at 100%. Anyone have an idea?

 

yes but that depends on the oil that u use, how u drive, the conditions you drive in, the weather, etc.

big factor really here is the oil that u use.

first two oil changes with Honda 0w20 conventional gave me 7684 miles and 7567 miles.

royal purple synthetic only netted me 5493 miles.

Pennzoil Platinum Synthetic last change gave me 8307 miles. I'm due for another and its almost at 10k miles for PP.

Some people here use PP, Mobil 1, Amsoil, which are rated for 10k miles or more and ignore the MM. I personally change at 15% following the MM.

 

Honda doesn't disclose the formula they use to calculate oil life but people surmise it's some factor involving miles and/or engine revolutions, cold starts, hot starts...

For the GE8 it doesn't measure actual oil but just engine factors.

So if your driving is relatively routine then it should be linear.

If you want an average I'd guess 7000 to 8000 miles from 100% to zero. People who do all highway driving (fewer engine revolutions per mile and fewer starts per mile) see much more miles per oil change.

 

The computer, so far as I know and so far as I've ever read, has no way of telling what kind of oil is used. It bases the numbers on engine use factors, such time, cold starts, and probably a bunch of other things. 50% is roughly half the mileage of 0%, assuming your driving style and habits are consistent, though it's hard to be too precise since it counts down by 10% increments (until 20%, if I remember correctly). If you do mostly city driving but then take a long road trip, you'll find that the meter drops much less rapidly per mile during the road trip.

I regularly see somewhere around 10,000 to 12,000 miles per oil change. My driving is mostly highway or highway-esque driving.

 

The maintenance minder system has no way to directly monitor oil type or actual condition. The entire minder system is based on a model....and that model relies on the correct products being used.

If you get your oil changed at JizzyLube and they dump in the cheapest no-name 10w30 they can find, the minder system doesn't have any way to know anything is different.


That said, I've seen the minder system turn on the wrench/15% at anywhere from 4000 miles to well over 10,000 miles. It all depends on how people drive it.

As the cars age and accumulate mileage, oil consumption may slowly increase and you need to check level regularly and if necessary top off the oil between changes.

 

I agree completely that The Maintenance Minder has no way of knowing what type of Oil you are using.

It does I would suspect however extrapolate or base it's formula on the assumption that you are using an Oil that meets the recommended OEM parameters.

I think if you keep your Fit filled with a good quality Oil, that meets those parameters you can easily simply let the maintenance minder dictate your Oil Change interval, assuming you never pass a full year without an Oil Change.

Since I think it is engine factors that dictate the maintenance minder, and those are manipulated by driving conditions, and styles, and variable realities, exactly predicting how many miles left 80% or 70% or any reading percentage might actually translate into is nearly impossible.

That in the simplest terms is WHY Honda has it say...Oil Life as opposed to saying Miles to Oil Change.

 

Agree that stop-and-go city driving burns the oil life much more quickly than smoother highway driving. I'm not aware of a way to correlate exactly how many miles correspond to remaining oil life.

 

Ditto on everything that has been said. To add, I drive my Fit almost exclusively highway miles and can get ~9k before getting at 15%. However my wife's civic is driven mostly in town and has the 15% warning come on at about 6k miles.

 

I drive mostly highway and average 11,375 miles between oil changes based on the maintenance minder. I usually let oil life get down to about 10% and then change it.

As others have said, the Fit uses driving inputs to figure oil life. It isn't like some cars (certain Mercedes models, for instance) that use electronics/sensors to look at/inspect the oil to determine the amount and type of contaminants in it.

 

Thanks everyone for your comments.

 

So are you saying that the engine "knows" when the oil is wearing out?

Does this mean that "15,000 mile" oil and oil filter can't really go 15,000 miles?

If you go beyond the 0% mark (about 10,500 miles) into negative miles by, say 1,776 miles, that the engine will be damaged, even though the oil and filter you paid $55 for say that they are good for 15,000 miles?

 

The engine computer "knows" how long the oil lasts based on the actual operating conditions of the engine. It doesn't know anything directly about the state of the oil that's actually in the engine.

Mileage is really not a very great way of measuring oil life because miles are at best only very roughly correlated with engine wear. At an extreme case, if you leave your engine running all the time while parked, the oil will eventually need changing even though your car has moved zero miles. More realistically, short stop-and-go trips around town are much, much harder on the oil and the engine in general than long cross-country interstate trips; most of the engine wear occurs within a comparatively short time after a cold start.

The only reasonably accurate way I know of to determine if your expensive oil and filter can go for significantly longer than the maintenance minder indicates is to send a sample off to be analyzed. It's certainly possible, at least in theory, that oil etc. which significantly exceeds the minimum specifications required by Honda could be appropriate for use for a notably longer period of time. It's also possible that it may not perform much if any better than "normal" stuff that costs half as much.

Every case I've read about here where people have had oil analyses done has indicated that the maintenance minder is pretty accurate but a little on the conservative side (i.e. you could get maybe 10% or so more life out of the oil than it indicates). It's certainly a significant improvement over blindly changing oil every x thousand miles regardless of driving conditions (or with, at best, a selection between "hard service" and "normal service").