Do you think Mike Rowe is right about US consumers?

[deerslayer]

16 hours ago, tercel89 said:

I would not pay it. The Toyota truck was made in Japan in the 80's. The newer ones are now made in Mexico and the reliability and workmanship is not as good. I would pay extra for Toyota's to be made in Japan. I have a 24 year old Mazda made COMPLETELY 100% in Japan. I still have it and it's going on 300,000 miles. It doesn't burn any oil at all . I also have an old Nissan Xterra that's 23 years old  (for sale on here) , and it's running as great as the Toyota because it was made as good as good as the old Nissan Hardbody's before them by the same design and engines. The newer stuff is unreliable. I hate to say it but Americans can't build anything reliable these days. The last few things that I know were built reliable by Americans was the Ford F100 straight six and the Bell "Huey" helicopter. But that's my $.02. 

My Tacoma is American made and it’s the best vehicle I’ve ever owned.  My wife has a Canadian made RAV4 that is too new to conclude it will be a long lasting vehicle, but so far, so good, and I have little reason to believe it won’t be reliable.  4Runners are still made in Japan.  
 

A mechanic friend swears that newer vehicle engines generally don’t last as long due to thinner oil being used nowadays, which he believes offers less protection (unless you floor it immediately after starting when it’s 10F outside) and burns easier.  He told me he sees newer vehicles using oil sooner and his solution is to switch to 0W-30 or 5W-30.  The problem often goes away for another 50-100k miles.  He believes if we still used 5W-30 from the get-go, this trend wouldn’t exist.  Older Toyotas (15-20 years ago) used 10w-30 or 5w-30.  My wife’s RAV4 says to use 0W-16.  I didn’t even know such watery oil existed.  

Edited February 9 by deerslayer

[MacGyver]

54 minutes ago, deerslayer said:

My Tacoma is American made and it’s the best vehicle I’ve ever owned.  My wife has a Canadian made RAV4 that is too new to conclude it will be a long lasting vehicle, but so far, so good, and I have little reason to believe it won’t be reliable.  4Runners are still made in Japan.  
 

A mechanic friend swears that newer vehicle engines generally don’t last as long due to thinner oil being used nowadays, which he believes offers less protection (unless you floor it immediately after starting when it’s 10F outside) and burns easier.  He told me he sees newer vehicles using oil sooner and his solution is to switch to 0W-30 or 5W-30.  The problem often goes away for another 50-100k miles.  He believes if we still used 5W-30 from the get-go, this trend wouldn’t exist.  Older Toyotas (15-20 years ago) used 10w-30 or 5w-30.  My wife’s RAV4 says to use 0W-16.  I didn’t even know such watery oil existed.  

My local Toyota dealer showed me my oil after my 10k oil change just because I was curious.

It was 0w-10 or some such.  After a full 10,000 miles on a truck with 75k on it - it basically looked like a bottle of water.  It was clean and clear.

 

[deerslayer]

14 minutes ago, MacGyver said:

My local Toyota dealer showed me my oil after my 10k oil change just because I was curious.

It was 0w-10 or some such.  After a full 10,000 miles on a truck with 75k on it - it basically looked like a bottle of water.  It was clean and clear.

 

I’ve always changed my own oil and there is always a definite difference in the appearance of the oil that came out vs. the oil that goes in, whether it’s 10w-40 or 0w-16.  

[MacGyver]

2 hours ago, deerslayer said:

I’ve always changed my own oil and there is always a definite difference in the appearance of the oil that came out vs. the oil that goes in, whether it’s 10w-40 or 0w-16.  

I'm sure I could tell the difference holding the two up to one another.  Just saying - it was awfully clean - unlike the 10w-40 back in the day.

Nothing to add other than I'm kind of amazed at some technical advances that make that stuff possible.  I wonder what sort of gas mileage difference can be attributed to using that much lighter weight oil?

[Erik88]

4 hours ago, deerslayer said:

A mechanic friend swears that newer vehicle engines generally don’t last as long due to thinner oil being used nowadays,

How new? I thought that modern engines are typically more reliable. 30-40 years ago going 150k miles was considered a lot. Most modern vehicles can do that with ease. Plenty of guys on the Toyota forum pushing 300-400k. A few have hit 1 million which is insane. 

 

 

 

[btq96r]

4 hours ago, MacGyver said:

But then one day you wake up - and you've lost core capabilities.  You literally cannot do those critical things anymore.  You get to a point where not only have you taken advantage of your employees - but now your business model depends on that low cost labor because management has looted every last dollar and there's nothing left.

Saw this in action just this week.  Caught it from the mezzanine, as I'm operations, not IT.  But I understand enough to know what went wrong.

Had a simple enough task for qualified folks, changing out a 1GB network switch for a 10GB one.  The current setup was put in place in painstaking detail by an employee who was local, loved his job, and bent over backwards to do good work every time.  That is, until he left due to being fed up with shortsightedness, and being overworked.

Now, instead of a local guy who manages something he has pride of ownership in, we had to rely on a remote resource, who while I'm sure has decent skills, just didn't have enough to make the switch and get everything back up.  I'll bet as much as I plan to bet throughout the Super Bowl that it just came down to being a roving network engineer, instead of a dedicated resource locally.  We had to roll back to what we were trying to upgrade, and we lost an hour of productivity, which is a lot on a Wednesday afternoon.  Another attempt is pending time to schedule it.

But the overall labor cost is down still, so blips like this are the cost of doing business from the day our local guy left and going forward.  I just hope we don't have anything bad happen.  Everything works fine...until it doesn't.

[deerslayer]

21 minutes ago, MacGyver said:

I'm sure I could tell the difference holding the two up to one another.  Just saying - it was awfully clean - unlike the 10w-40 back in the day.

I would think the quality of the oil (maybe synthetic vs dino) would be a bigger factor than the viscosity. 
 

21 minutes ago, MacGyver said:

Nothing to add other than I'm kind of amazed at some technical advances that make that stuff possible.  I wonder what sort of gas mileage difference can be attributed to using that much lighter weight oil?

Probably barely measurable, but every bit counts when the EPA is sniping at you.  
 

I’m not sure if I buy my mechanic friend’s theory about running thicker oil from the beginning, but I know for certain that an engine that already uses oil will use thinner oil more quickly.  Back in the day, I had a Ford Ranger with bad rings.  It would foul a plug in three months.  I switched to 20-50 and the oil consumption slowed somewhat.  

[deerslayer]

1 minute ago, Erik88 said:

How new? I thought that modern engines are typically more reliable. 30-40 years ago going 150k miles was considered a lot. Most modern vehicles can do that with ease. Plenty of guys on the Toyota forum pushing 300-400k. A few have hit 1 million which is insane. 

 

 

 

He was calling newer cars those that recommend 0w20 or 0w16 vs those whose manuals recommend 5w30, so I’m thinking by “newer” he meant 5-10 years old.  I don’t think he had the cars of yesteryear that used 10w40 or 20w50 in mind.  He didn’t say engines are blowing up, but oil consumption is on the rise.