I used to run synthetic in my 08 buy always seemed to burn way more oil than what I thought it should. I tried a bunch of different brands and different weights (5-w20 was the worst) but they were all pretty much the same. I was running low one day and wanted to top off the oil, but the only thing available was semi-synthetic so I ended up using that. It seemed to last a bit longer, so the next oil change I switched to semi-synthetic (10-w30) and that worked pretty well. A few oil changes later I went with a 10-w40 and that seemed to work the best (least amount of oil consumption and engine pinging). I've been running the 10-w40 for about 10k miles with good results - still burns some oil and still pings on hot days, but nothing like it did before.
I have run synthetic in my Nissan Pathfinder since mile one (currently at 152k) with no engine issues, and I ran synthetic on my old Audi A4 for 180k with no problems. As a counter point, I ran my 1982 Toyota Corolla until I drove it to the junk yard with 285k miles on the odometer with the engine still running, but it burned a quart of oil every 200 miles for the last 10k of its life ( although I'm pretty sure my brother ran the engine for some time with little to no oil in it - Hey Bro, is it bad when the oil light flashes at you? Been doing that for a couple of days
).
It seems that synthetic truly is a better oil for a lot of reasons, but my Jeep likes the cheaper stuff better. I wonder if it really matters so long as you always maintain your levels and do regular oil changes with new filters each time - I wonder how many engines these days fail because of the use of dino oil over synthetic?
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