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His "engineering vs. marketing" explanation makes sense to me. In essence, Toyota marketing asked engineering if the engine will experience any problems within the 60 month/60,000 mile drive train warranty if the oil change interval was 10K miles. Engineering tells marketing the 10k oil change interval may lead to problems, but not until after the warranty period. Marketing says great, lets use the 10k reduced maintenance requirement as a feature to sell more cars!
I'm calling BS on his explanation. Toyota does not do business that way. Some other car companies would be more likely to meet this quote.
I'm also not buying it. Doesn't Toyota also have 100,000 mile spark plugs, long-life coolant, etc?
So many people take cars to 100,000, 200,000 or more, they'd get a bad rap and it would hurt sales.
I just skimmed the video, it's long, but is this based on just one (or a few?) examples? I recently had this discussion with someone who instead their 20046 GM required oil changes at 3000 miles, and that the manual said so. No, I found the manual on-line, and some GM tech papers. Follow the oil-minder, it generally comes on ~ 5,000~10,000 miles depending.
The old
"I change my oil every 3,000 miles and never had an engine problem!" is phony logic. You very well may have also had no engine problems if you followed the oil-minder (based on total revolutions and temperature). In the process of doing some searching, I found plenty of posts to an owner's forum where people reported getting 250,000~300,000 miles following the oil-minder. Sure, that's anecdotal as well, but if the oil-minder was that aggressive, you'd think that would be almost impossible.
Remember, the oil-minder is taking driving conditions into account. You don't need to adjust for 'severe' driving vs highway driving, it does it for you.
-ERD50