https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2024/09/25/how-long-is-a-lifetime-2/
How Long is a “Lifetime”?
By Eric – September 25, 2024
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One of the great scams perpetrated on car buyers is selling them on the idea of “lifetime” fluids – such as transmission fluid, for instance. And coolant. Also oil changes that don’t require doing but once every 7,500 (or even more) miles.
It’s sold this way to sell them on “low maintenance costs” – and that’s true. You just pay for it later, in the form of expensive repair costs caused or hastened by those “low maintenance costs.”
The trick works like this:
Advertise “lifetime” fluids – which leads the mark to believe that means forever. As in the fluid never needs to be changed. What it actually means is for the lifetime . . . of the warranty coverage. And that’s probably true. Those numbers – ten years, 100,000 miles as an example – are not picked out of a hat. They are arrived at after extensive durability studies that accurately foretell how long a component such as a transmission will probably last before it fails if it isn’t serviced during its “lifetime.”
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It’s not so much that the fluids – such as the hydraulic fluid in an automatic transmission (or the gear oil in a manual transmission or engine oil) go bad. It is that they get contaminated with the byproducts of mechanical components meshing and unmeshing in an environment of high heat and pressure. Inevitably, the contaminants build up, inevitable reducing the anti-friction properties of the fluid. Fine particles accrue, like plaque inside our arteries, with the same inevitable result. A filter will filter out a lot of these small bits but what happens when the filter can no longer filter – because it’s full of those small bits and pieces?
It stops filtering.
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