To kick-off Noria's new message boards, we're giving an electronic copy of Jim Fitch's new book How to Select a Motor Oil and Filter to the first 10 visitors that register and post a question, tip or case study (relevant and meaningful posts only ) to our new boards.

The market is flooded with oils of all makes,
multinational colloborations.But the consumer
has not benefitted out of this compettition.InfaCT
due tom declining margins anyone or some in the
supply chains is resorting to the cheap method of
substituting an inferior product in a superior package of a rival brand.


This is unethical,fraud on the consumer,the rival
company and a mockery of the statues and the level
of technology to deal with such problems

My question is
Are there mobile kits available to analyse the oil
in question
Is it at an affordable range to most of the customers
Are there associations to help the consumer in this
Cant we make out if we have used an duplicate oil
to our car.

prithvithomas2004

The product you buy is definitly genuine. You are guaranteed to get what you bought, the dificulty is what have I just bought?
Organisations that are out there to protect you are the US Federal Dept of Trade who are there to "protect" consumers from fradulent advertisers. (I don't think their record is the best) Because the onus of proof is on the accuser to prove the claims are not accurate.
You have SAE with their donut where a percentage of the oils get re-certified each year to insure that they conform to the SAE performance and physical property critera. Again the difficulties are that the people they police are also the people that pay the cost of the testing and hence the ability of SAE to survive. This can call into question the objectivity of the process.
If you know enough about what you are looking for in a "superior" offering then the MSDS sheets can be quite reveling about the actual base stocks and to some extent the additaves.
As far as an end user, financially friendly mobile kit, you'd have the same issues...am I getting what I think the advertisers are saying I'm getting?
Remember the old expression, "buyers beware!" The best way to protect yourself is to arm yourself with knowledge, If you find something being advertised that seems too good to be true it probably is. It seems that the ones with the less to offer are often the ones who scream the loudest. Yu don't have to search too far in these forums to identify those individuals.
Once you identify an apparent fraudlent supplier you should consider all of their offerings to be suspect. We can only hope that eventually they will go the way of the Do Do bird.

regards......

It won't be long now and you'll be seeing and looking for "SM" instead of "SJ" or "SL". If the oil you're looking at doesn't have "SM" Ask your clerk or garage guy if it matches the model year of your car.
Your Owner's Manual will likely mention "Synthetic Mtor Oil". Some dealers are hell bent for leather on the topic, either they love it or they hate it. They love it if they're informed but hate it if they the're clueless and have to push their product or get canned.

RH