Severe operating conditions

[i.am.aids]

And your car does not have an hour meter like a standby generator

Oil changes, IMHO, should be preferentially based on operating hours rather than kilometers.

Heavy duty US trucks have engine hour readouts. Ambulances, for one, since they are often left idling for long periods of time on standby... ready to move at a moment's notice.

Of local trucks, I recall only the Chevy Trailblazer and Colorado having this as one of the available readouts. Pretty useful, actually, to see how much time the engine is on, regardless of the odometer reading.

I also recall old (really old) Corvettes had a rev counter that counted how many revolutions total your engine performed over its lifespan.

I was expecting that 'engine hours' is easily accesible from the OBD interface but apparently, not. Based on the OBD II PIDs, this should be at 7F (Engine run time). Mitsubishi ECU (Montero) is not storing this information. The closest information available is 1F (Run time since engine start) but this requires recording every trip you have, which I don't want to do. More info here ---> OBD-II PIDs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On the context of engine hours, extended idling and heavy traffic is considered severe operating condition. The car's engine is being used without being registered on the odometer. If your usual commute takes you 45 mins on a slow moving traffic and just 15 mins on light traffic, on the same route, that means you are using your car 3 times longer. Therefore, the usual 5k-10k oil change interval is no longer applicable. Based on our example, a 5k reading on odometer would actually be 15k on light traffic.

I plan to follow a 10k interval oil change schedule, but since it's my first time to do it and my usual commute is EDSA on rush hour, I think I'll have an oil analysis once I reach 8k. Using Mobil 1 TDT and BD28, btw.