Hey all first of all I am a total nerd when it comes to oil change interval and I am obsessed with tracking how long before the sensor says it bad.

Coming up on my first oil change 5% at 8,750MI in my first brand new car and I am slightly shocked it does not require synthetic like my Dart did (mainly due to the grade being only available in synthetic. So with that in mind when I found this out and went to Oriellys I just about had an existential crisis when faced with the option of getting not only regular or synthetic oil (in 5w-20) which is called for in my 18' but a regular filter or synthetic filter as well! So since mobile was on sale I bought it in synthetic and bought the synthetic wix filter for twice as much almost 20$ for a filter! I don't think I really need to run synthetic as I only drive 6 mi to work and don't drive particularly hard as this car is fast enough and probably going to put on less than 10,ooo miles a year but clearly you can see why I grabbed the synthetic to see if it would trick the system into a longer interval or not replace the filter once. IDK I havn't done the change yet but I know Im probably way overthinking it. Any fellow nerds out there want to chime in? thanks.

 

For those that REALLY want to overthink this, there is a good article here about how the system works. And yep, Dodge REALLY overthought this one.

 

If you only drive 6mi to work, there 12 a day; do you let it warm up or get in and go? How much actual driving do you do where the car has a chance to really get hot enough to burn the condensation out of the crankcase? If you go weeks at a time with your 12 a day and not much else, I'd stick with synthetic just to cut down on the possible sludge build up.