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 2013 CRV (2.5L) has the oil maintenance minder too. However, my car seems to burn or leak or otherwise consume oil but doesn’t understand it needs to be topped up. If I never physically checked the level between oil changes I would have close to no oil left. Check your oil levels people.
I can get that the ECU can have an oil-use model that will be a good predictor of life, but on the other hand this is dumbing things down, along the lines of cars not having oil dipsticks, or the manual in my newest car that tells me to take my car to the dealer to change wheels instead of providing a torque spec for the wheel nuts. It’s happy to give you 100 pages on how to use the infotainment system though.
Compare to manuals for my older cars that include torque settings for every fastener in the car and wiring diagrams.
I think this is a little different. The computer has a lot more data on what that particular engine has been doing so it can give you a customized recommendation. That’s always gonna be more valuable than a generic change at 5000 miles or whatever.
Not to say that either of those is necessarily always going to be the right answer.
My old Honda manuals give you instructions on how to change the transmission oil.
You could have just gotten a two-stroke instead, you know.
I change mine every spring. I don’t even get close to hitting 3K miles in a year, but I just don’t feel comfortable with >1year old oil and all the condensation cycles that may come in a year. Supposedly oils also get acidic over time, but I doubt that’s still true with modern oils.
No even modern oils will get acidic over time. Your maintenance plan is a good one.
This is very similar to my Volt- I run 85% on electric so it could be years before I change the oil, the service manual says the intervals are just kind suggestions and really it says, if it tells you to change or do something do it.
The old school 3,000/3 month oil change interval is actually still relevant today especially for engines that don’t tolerate any oil maintenance neglect like early Chrysler 2.7s, Ford 5.4 3 Valves , and the LY7/LLT GM 3.6s as well as the LAF/LEA 2.4s.
This makes total sense for a hybrid that might only have the engine firing 20% of the miles or 80% depending on use case.
Every time I’d do a full power run in my C5 Corvette, the oil life gauge would drop a percent. It knows.
On my second Honda minivan and both have had the maintenance minder. You just pay attention to that and you’re fine. Of course the stealership says to bring it in with the oil life at 30%, which sort of defeats the purpose of the car monitoring it so you don’t take it in too often. I have found it does vary a bit how many miles you went depending on how you were driving.
Ch-ch-ch-ch changes …
Time to Change the Oil
Ch-ch changes…
My ‘16 Mazda6 has something like this. It illuminates a wrench icon on the gauge cluster when an oil change and tire rotation is required. The first time it happened, the car was new at around 5,600 miles and I thought the wrench was a “check engine” light.
I was understandably disappointed at the wrench until I checked the index of the owner’s manual and the “quick guide” again.
The 6 itself has two settings – a “flexible” one where I let the car figure out when it should have an oil change, similar to what your CR-V is doing, and a “fixed” one to where I just set a mileage I want to go to and the car counts down to that mileage before it warns me. I’ve never really trusted the “flexible” option, so I set the “fixed” one to 6,000 miles per the advice of my friend who runs the tire and brake shop I take the car to.
Because they don’t actually care. As long as the engine doesn’t blow up within the warranty period, it’s just good enough for the average first consumer. What’s the point of manufacturing durable goods that are so durable, you deny yourself future profit? This is how BMW and Land Rover eventually shifted to engineering their vehicles to be explicitly lease machines.
this very much. I recently was trying to establish should I change oil in wife’s new Qashqai; it currently has 6000 km, and that is the mileage (erhm, kilometroage, SI rules!) I was taught to get a first oil change at. Lo and behold, my lease operator pays only for manufacturer-required services, and Nissan recommends oil changes each (wait for it) 30 000 km (or after a year). So damn, driving 30kkm on factory-poured oil makes me uncomfortable, but that’s the way if you don’t give a shit about your product’s longevity or mechanical sympathy.
OEMs do all their durability testing on the recommended oil change schedule. It’s proven durable. Does it make it more durable if you change it more often? Maybe, who knows? The OEM doesn’t have the data and every other data source is anecdotal.
But what is the expected lifetime? VW claimed few years a go that 200tkm, which pretty much is bang on the money on what point engines have to be changed.
Personally I prefer to change oils, not engines.
The design life is whatever the OEM set it as, I don’t know why they aren’t open about it, probably marketing.
Despite having owned cars with up to 250,000 miles on them I’ve never had* to change an engine, so I guess I’m more focused on not spending money on oil changes.
* putting a Lexus V8 into a 60’s Volvo was for fun, and the V8 RX7 was already missing it’s Wankel.
And the lifetime is designed such so that it looks good and cheap to maintain for the firsth 100tkm which is the king in German car magazines.
I’ve shopped used VW Multivans and Caravelles for second car (we’ve got ID4 derivate for the most use). It’s kinda depressing that almost 50% of the 2012-2016 vans with about 15-200tkm have second engine. And it’s directly related to silly 30tkm oil exchange intervals. These are also used as taxis here and they’ve got 15tkm intervals and no issues with engies even around 400tkm.
Our one-owner CR-V (K24 engine) has been maintained per the maintenance minder for the last 17 years and 190K miles. We run full synthetic oil, but even at the recommended 5-20W the car uses very little oil between changes which are usually in the 8K mile range.
The maintenance minder will noticeably shrink your service interval if you make a lot of cold-start short trips. If you’re doing mostly extended highway driving, it will lengthen the interval significantly.
I think the “or 12 months” caveat is fine, although that’s probably in part to ensure that owners don’t ignore other wear items like brakes, tires, and filters. During Covid times our annual mileage dropped considerably and I think we went 2 years between oil changes, but I regularly checked fluid levels, tire pressures, etc. which, according to my mechanic, makes me unusual among his customers.
(Obligatory anecdote: family member has 2008 CR-V which has been on a strict 4K oil change interval since purchase at ~25K miles. It now needs its original engine rebuilt – which it won’t be getting – at 545,000 miles. So, if you want to keep your car a reallllllly long time….)
I’m all about following manufacturer’s guidelines for oil change intervals. Except for the first oil change. There are a lot of break-in metals in break-in oil. It might be fine to have all that metal suspended in the oil (that is, after all, one of the things the oil is supposed to do), but lots of knowledgeable people think it’s not great. So I do the first oil change at around 1,000 miles, and send that oil off to Blackstone. I’ve done this with a couple of new cars, and boy is there a lot of metal in that break-in oil.
My Focus RS didn’t publish an interval, but it went off reliably at 10,000 miles.
When I bought my RX8 they told me that there is no break in period on the engine, I can go full throttle right away, but they also told me to come back between 400 and 500 miles for an oil change free of cost.
Even with a good clean of all the castings before engine build you will still get machining swarf and metal dust in every new engine. The metal you find in the oil at the first oil change isn’t necessarily metal from parts wearing in.
Yeah, it drives me crazy that manufacturers recommend running the break in oil just as long as any other oil change interval. Ask any engine builder if you need to change the break in oil early and you’ll get one answer- YES. And it’s easy to see why: you don’t need Blackstone to see that the oil is a shiny gray metallic after like 1000 miles.
Does Torch know you put the eyes in the windshield in that top shot?!?
Beat me to it.
Matt I anticipate seeing you and Torch in Tales from the Slack this week.
You monsters! Everyone knows the headlights are the eyes!
EYES ON THE WINDSHIELD !?!
Are you trying to send Jason back to the hospital?
Does it have a dipstick? Hate that some don’t. I’d check color/level every month/thousand miles with any new to me car till I was sure all was as should be. Modern full synthetics should easily last past 5k, but I never go past 7500 before changing.
That’s with regular ICE set up, you can probably double that with hybrid and local driving, but I’d go for as many free changes as you can get with a new car.
Even modern engines, especially with the 0W-16s and -20s, can use a decent amount of oil never mind the risk of combining that with these long intervals without a dipstick. I wouldn’t buy a car with just some worthless light that says, “low oil, oops, and rod knock, too!”
My ’17 Accord V6 has that same setup; it alerts about 10K miles.
I change the oil at 5K because I’m old and don’t trust that long on interval between changes, even w/synth. I’ve been a mechanic for many years and the one common factor between sludged-up engines, whether it’s a ’75 Olds or 2010 Camry, is not changing the oil enough.
I think that a lot of recent engines should return to shorter change intervals, if not necessarily 3k, particularly high compression turbos due to gasoline contamination in the oil if used for shorter trips (does the MM take that into account? Honda’s problems with the 1.5T would say it doesn’t). Being a 2.0 Atkinson with probably minimal heavy use and not high rpm, yeah, it’s probably OK to go by the MM, but I get the trepidation. I did 10k changes on my ’12 Focus 5MT and it still ran perfectly with no other maintenance when it got totaled with over 200k miles on it. Mostly easy highway and heavy traffic driving, but virtually no short trips. The thing that always has me wondering is the more occasional running and short intervals of the engines in hybrids. Plenty of them seem to get big miles, so I guess they have it figured out, but it still gives me pause to think it’s frequently starting and stopping and I don’t know how they manage to get and maintain everything at proper temperatures that way.
Honda has been doing this for a long time and it sucks. I don’t think my 2010 Fit had a mileage interval, just a maintenance minder and an asterisk telling you to change it after 12 months if the minder has minded you. I worked at one of the big online diag platforms (think Alldata, etc.) and we would get calls all the time from shops that couldn’t believe there wasn’t a maintenance schedule. It makes it difficult for everyone.
As indicated, the diagnostics can do a better job of predicting oil life; not all miles are created equal.
Old[er] user manuals used Normal and Severe Duty (or similar) categories to determine the maintenance intervals. However, the only way to fall into the Normal driving category was to drive <500 miles per month in a straight line at a steady 35mph on a clean, level, and stoplight-free road on 72F sunny days. Anything else put you directly into the Severe category with its associated shorter maintenance interval, e.g. 3000 miles between oil changes instead of 5000.
Drive on hills or mountains, even a little bit? Severe.
Drive in cities, even a little bit? Severe.
Drive in dusty conditions? Severe.
Drive in the rain? Severe.
Drive in mud after the rain falls on the dust? Severe.
I see we’ve come across some of the same manuals!
😀
The ECU knows a lot more about what your engine has been doing than your odometer does.
For real. I get being angry about some of the genuinely bad “improvements” like the removal of dipsticks (cost cutting measure) or not telling you the torque spec for your lugnuts (bring it to the dealer for $$$), but a “mileage or time” interval on oil changes is a really, really stupid way of doing it, arguably worse than going by “da feelz”. Duty cycles are a thing, and the duty cycle for a little old grannie who drives her car a few miles once a week to church on Sunday looks very, very different from contract Amazon delivery person trying to stay afloat during the holiday rush doing stop ‘n goes downtown. A well-design ECU and monitoring software will be miles better at figuring out how to keep the engine from either a) seizing up or b) rusting solid than just “yeah, 6k miles is 6k miles, good enough right?”
My best friend in college thought it was funny/was proud of the fact he hadn’t changed the oil in his car for 2+ years at one point. It also took him 3+ months of that same car having a horrific grinding noise while braking to tell his dad and finally get his brakes changed.
Once he graduated and had that engineering job money, he bought a new car: Mazda RX-8.
Also, the maintenance schedule for my car says 10k miles. But the maintenance reminder on the dash for oil changes is set to 5k. Make up your mind.
Someone lackadaisical about car maintenance bought an RX-8? Lol I bet that went swimmingly.
When I had my BMW, they had a more primitive, but similar system where the car would tell you when it was time to change the oil. It could have been up to 15k miles, but I did it every 10k kilometers.
Matt, at least you won’t have the 1.5t oil dilution issues. Still, err on the side of caution.
My family owns 3 Hondas and they all use this maintenance minder system. It’s generally pretty trustworthy. Oil changes are more frequent tho. The cars usually say to change it around 8-9k but i usually do around 5-7k. The CRV is strictly 5k or less because it has the 1.5.
The Jeep dealer puts a sticker on my windshield that says to come back in 3K. Does anyone actually do that anymore? The manual says 7k but I ust go by the oil lifetime monitor. When it gets down to 20% I take it in or do it myself.