For a maintainer, certainly. For the average vehicle user, he thought he was doing good. He changed the oil every time the reminder came up. The manual told him it was ok. Never mind the "10,000 miles or once a year" part in the manual.
That being said, being that the girlfriend does in home health care and still has a child living at home, she's hitting damn near 10,000 miles every 6 frigging months. Most times I catch it before the reminder comes on but it's not far away. Thus why I'm very interested to see what the screens look like.
Sure, makes sense.
But as you know, once a motor starts "eating itself up" it's like a snowball rolling down hill.. little problems become huge in a hurry. I'll bet those screens got plugged up a few thousand miles before it died, and not before. All that metal in the oil means sudden death, not a prolonged slow death.
I change our Rangers oil / filter every 4,000 miles... I'm retired so the intervals are about twice a year.
But back when I was working, I was changing oil on the Tacoma about 4 times a year, and that was at every 8,000 miles (Mobil 1). I don't think I'd be driving a turbo motored car if I was putting that many miles on the motor. Simply because of the oil change intervals.
I'm still not sold on these Direct Injection & Turbocharged motors. They sure are fun to drive, but I'd rather have a conventional fuel injected V-6 or V-8, where the fuel washes the valves and there's no turbo to deal with and the oil stays nice and clean.
Just too much to go wrong with these new fangled high strung DI Turbo'd Pinto banger motors. At this point in my life... less is more.
Again... looking forward to you sharing what your exploratory surgery reveals.
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