My new Honda CR-V Hybrid has already changed my driving habits for the better, getting me to slow down and focus on efficiency over speed. There’s another habit Honda is trying to get me to change: the habit of having a strict maintenance schedule I follow to keep my car on the road for as long as possible. Why? Because my Honda doesn’t have a maintenance schedule.
Like most car people, I’ve owned many cars in my life, and all of them have recommendations for when/how/why you should change various belts, fluids, and other consumables. My old BMW has over 230k miles on the odometer and the previous owner nicely sent over a spreadsheet with all the work that’s been done to the car in his care so I could make sure to follow the same intervals.
I’m a big fan of this spreadsheet, so my goal last week was to recreate it and leave myself little guides for when I should bring my brand new Honda in for service. The first service, obviously, would be an oil change, and this sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find an oil change recommendation that, it turns out, doesn’t exist.
For the record, there’s the maintenance interval for my old Subaru above.
When Should You Change Your CR-V’s Oil? It Depends…
Conceptually, the idea of an oil change interval is slightly flawed. Few cars are driven exactly the same way, under the same conditions, in the same place. When an automaker says a car needs to have its oil changed at 4,000 miles or 6,000 miles it’s making a best guess based on how most people drive.
As anyone who isn’t perfectly rigid about oil changes knows, you can drive for a long distance past the recommendation and you’ll probably be fine. Hell, I knew someone who had a parent do the oil changes for them and their Honda Pilot and; when that person moved, they just completely forgot to do oil changes! That Pilot was able to go almost another 40,000 miles before the engine seized.
Still, I’m used to there being at least some kind of guideline to follow. My previous car, a then-new 2016 Subaru Forester had a 6,000-mile recommended oil change interval (see above), but I generally tried to get the oil changed at 4,000-5,000 miles.
My first stop when trying to find out when I should change my Honda’s oil was the owner’s manual, assuming I might get a fun little chart with all the maintenance. Instead, I saw this:
Huh? I went to Google, to make sure I was understanding this correctly. Because this wasn’t a mileage number, it was a percentage.
I’m not the only one who has had this concern. Here’s a reddit thread on the topic:
There are numerous threads on the CR-V Owners Club Forum, including this one:
The “Maintenance Minder” is the little digital readout in a submenu on the electronic half of the gauge cluster. Here’s what mine currently shows:
I’m at 80% and have driven a little over 2,400 miles.
Here’s what Honda’s My Garage page says about oil changes:
There is no longer a maintenance schedule in the owner’s manual. The system shows engine oil life as a percentage, which drops over time as the vehicle racks up miles. It starts out at 100% with fresh engine oil, and winds down to 0%, signaling the oil life is over. Your Honda will alert you with a visual warning light to indicate not only when the next service is due, but also what type of service is needed by a series of codes.
That makes sense, I guess? There aren’t specific timelines for most replacements, and the car will just tell you. There are a bunch of codes that you can easily interpret with the guide that comes in the manual. If you see “B5” then it means you need an overall inspection and you need to replace your engine coolant. If you have “A1” it means you need to rotate your tires and change your oil.
I’m generally a fan of having your car give you this kind of info though, in an ideal world, you’d get OBDII codes right on the dash or one of the many in-car screens. Still, this is a helpful tool for people who don’t want to think too much about taking care of their car.
While the manual does not give an oil change recommendation, specifically, there are some general mileages listed for certain conditions like changing in the air cleaner element at 15,000 miles if you live somewhere dusty.
What Does Honda Say About This?
Conveniently, our local Honda PR minder Chris Naughton also just bought an almost identical Honda CR-V Hybrid and we’ve been keeping in touch about how our crossovers are performing. I was tempted to get a FWD model for the fuel economy improvements and that’s what Chris has, so now I can make a reasonable A/B comparison (he is currently kicking my ass).
I asked Chris about the oil thing and here’s what he had to say:
We’d recommend that you follow the guidance of the Maintenance Minder system. It’s explained in the owner’s manual, but in a nutshell, it’s wasteful (financially) and contributing more to environmental degradation by changing the oil too frequently. Modern oils last longer than oils used in the 80’s and 90’s.
Our maintenance minder is smart enough to know how the car is actually used, including RPMs, ambient and engine temperature, etc. to find a conservative spot to recommend an oil change. It errs on the side of engine longevity. You’ll find a % of oil life remaining on the instrument panel. If you’re getting more miles than you’d expect between oil changes, it indicates that your vehicle is seeing light usage, etc. If you experience severe usage conditions, then it will likely recommend a change more often. Ultimately, it will set an oil change reminder at least once per year, regardless of mileage.
The 2.0-liter, naturally aspirated inline-four in my car is only used roughly 40-60% of the time I’m driving, so it’s logical that the oil change intervals would be longer than for my previous vehicle. The motor also acts as a generator when the car is below 45 mph, which is probably 80% of the time I’m driving (and even then it isn’t particularly taxed when in generator mode).
Based on the forums, it sounds like 10,000 miles is when most CR-V owners get the 15% maintenance minder alert. Given how the motor is used in most cars, this makes sense. If someone is on the highway more often, or going over steep grades, I imagine that mileage is going to be lower because that’s when RPMs are higher.
I Have Nothing To Worry About, But I Do Still Worry A Little
Again, this all makes logical sense to me. A vehicle with a lot of sensors will do a better job of knowing when to change my oil than I could, just putting in dates in a spreadsheet. If I’m really worried about what the oil condition is I can always grab the dipstick and look.
In fact, when I get to 15% I’m going to look at the oil and see what it looks like because I’m curious.
Even though I logically know that this is just one less thing I have to think about, some small part of my “lizard brain” (as one CR-V owner put it) would feel better if I had a number, even if that number is wrong.
As Consumer Reports recently pointed out, we’re probably all changing our oil too often for modern cars:
The “every 3,000 miles or every three months” rule is outdated because of advances in both engines and oil. Many automakers have oil-change intervals at 7,500 or even 10,000 miles and six or 12 months.
“Your owner’s manual has more detailed information about your car than any mechanic does,” Ibbotson says. “Don’t get talked into too-often oil changes. Follow the manual and your car’s engine should stay well-lubricated and perform well.
Basically, I will change the oil when it says 15% or I get to 11 months, whichever happens first. The good news is that Honda gives me two years of free regular maintenance, so when I do change the oil I don’t have to pay for it.
my 2009 Honda Fit has the same system, which also gives me fits.. so I change at 7-8k regardless. The first time I let the monitor run things it went to 15 000 and told me there was still 25% oil life left. At that point my tolerances were exceeded and I changed it anyway.
Any oil monitor that isn’t physically and chemically testing the oil is going to be inaccurate at some level, since those monitors are only algorithms.
There are no monitors that physically and chemically test the oil 😉
In my single model forum. Many members have done oil analyses on oil changes using the maintenance minder and have shown that the oil is completely within spec at this interval. I use my minder as a guide and replace my oil twice a year on average ( with between 10 to 12K mileage between changes) . My car is a hybrid and correlated that my engine is on between 40 to 50% of the time with my commute.
I’m on a single-model Facebook group for my Honda (yeah, cringe, but sometimes it pays off) and every couple of weeks, the boomers sound off on oil changes and rail against the maintenance minder. The going conspiracy theory is the maintenance minder extends oil change intervals to decrease calculated cost of ownership – nevermind that a seized engine is worse for sales than an extra hundred dollars a year in oil changes.
I’m in some Mazda car groups too and they insist on changing fluids before the maintenance schedule Mazda specifies because they say that Mazda “wants the cars to die so you have to buy new ones.”
So this makes me think: on this car oil change intervals would be a good indicator of how hard the car’s been driven(including harsh climate variables),right?
That might make things easier for the next buyer
The “every 3,000 miles or every three months” rule is outdated because of advances in both engines and oil. Many automakers have oil-change intervals at 7,500 or even 10,000 miles and six or 12 months.
I hate it so much when people say stuff like this. No, 3000-5000 miles is not outdated. No, I’m not confident that new oil actually lasts 2-3x longer than oil did 20 years ago. Yes, some manufacturers recommend 7500 or 10,000 mile intervals, or even 15k. You know what else those manufacturers tend to have? Poor engine life.
Change the frickin oil. Its not that expensive, or that hard. I do oil changes for about $25 in about 30 minutes.
I am also not confident that time is all that big a factor. 3 months is extremely frequent if you don’t have the miles to back it up. I tend to only hit the 5000 mile mark about once a year, so I change my oil once a year. I’d have no problem with letting my oil get several years old if it still looked good and didn’t have many miles, or a ton of short trips.
I can see 5k on a DI turbocharged engine, but otherwise it’s a waste of time and money. Let UOA dictate OCI instead. Doubling that to 10k saves many hundreds of dollars over the life of a vehicle if it’s safe.
I went 10k on my ’06 Altima and my wife’s ’01 Galant once we moved in together, because I was tired of doing oil changes constantly. Good synthetic oil + decent filters + port injection means you can generally get long intervals with zero consequences, backed up by data. The Altima was sold to a coworker, it has 230k miles and he’s following that 10k interval still. It burns 0.5 qt in that time period.
I do follow the 6k recommendation on our ’21 Outback, partly because it’s still under the powertrain warranty, but also because that’s when the tire rotations are performed. I might bump both to 7500 later on.
My Honda is like that but it’s fine once I got used to it. But it works. I got an oil change just before a ~2k mile (round trip) road trip. The percentage thing was still at just below 90 percent when we got home from all the highway driving.
My in-laws currently own 5 vehicles. They range from a 1989 f-150, 2000 jeep cherokee, 2003 Lincoln Navigator and their 2 daily driver vehicles. The first 3 have well over 200k miles on them and the dailies have mid 150s. They all get oil changes every 5k miles or 6 months. It may be wasteful to change oil that often but it certainly has made their cars last longer.
My company issue Focus is the same way, except there’s no actual way to check what the oil life is at any given time. When it gets to 15% it starts showing a “change oil soon” message briefly at startup, and maybe a thousand miles or so later, the message changes to a slightly more insistent “oil change required” that chimes at you and has to be actively “dismissed” from the screen.
It’s a fleet vehicle, and the schedule is to bring it in every 7500 miles, so that’s what I do. It’s never once even given me the “soon” warning in that mileage. Being oil change places virtually never remember to reset the oil change, I elected not to one time and was curious how many miles until the car started asking for one. I got the “change” soon warning at about 9000 miles and a little past 10k was “change required”. It’s mostly highway miles, so that’s not hugely surprising. The car has about 140k on it now, doesn’t use a drop of oil, and I’m sure it gets the cheapest bulk oil they can source. It doesn’t even look “that” bad color wise at 7500, still recognizably tan, not black.
The oil reset process is also goofy and cryptic. Option in the menu to reset? Pfft. Too easy. Key off, floor the gas pedal, foot on brake, turn key ON (don’t start). Wait like 15 seconds, and then a thing pops up on the screen that says oil reset “in progress”. You have to keep holding for another 10 seconds until it says “reset”.
It’s probably just because you’re used to keeping track of it by the miles…and when you get it changed they’ll probably still put that sticker w/ mileage in the corner…it’s still good to keep track of in multiple ways anyway