Even the companies that recommend more oil changes in Canada than they do in Europe don't always require as many oil changes as some people put their vehicles through.
To help buyers of many of their 2004 models figure out the best thing for their personal vehicle and the environment, General Motors has installed a sophisticated oil monitoring system -- the GM Oil Life System (OLS) -- that tells them when an oil change is due in nearly every new vehicle it sells.
OLS is on about 95 percent of the vehicles that GM sells today and can be found in vehicles dating back to the mid-90s.
As a result, says Peter Lord of GM Service Operations, ''This car care season, most owners of recent GM vehicles won't have to worry about deciding when to change their engine oil because leading-edge technology will determine the right time for them.''
Depending on their actual driving tendencies, says Lord, this means that many recent GM models ''will often double or even triple the oil change interval when compared to the 5,000-km oil change.''
Lord says this means that ''overall operating costs for the customer will be lower, because they only have to change the oil when needed.''
How much you save will of course depend upon how often you normally change your vehicle's oil and what kind of driving you do.
According to GM, if your driving consists primarily of highway driving when moving at or near the speed limits, then you shouldn't need to change your oil any more than every 12,000 km, or maybe even every 20,000 km.
On average, that means an oil change need be done only once a year. Yes, I meant once a year.
If you're following the 5,000-km rule now for oil changes, cutting back to an annual oil change would save you at least $100 a year and the environment a significant number of liters of oil. This will vary, of course, by the number of liters of oil you engine requires.
Even if you do a traditional range of ''mixed service'' driving on the highway and city streets, Lord says, the GM Oil Life System only requires an oil change every 7,000-11,000 km.
GM has sold about 20 million OLS-equipped vehicles in the last 20 years, Lord says, and if every one of those vehicles and the ones it sells in the next five years followed their individual guidelines as determined by the monitoring system, then almost 375 million liters of oil could be saved.