How to choose the right oil for a truck

Right now the market offers a huge number of engine oils of various types from manufacturers around the world, so drivers often find themselves facing a dilemma over exactly which one to choose for their vehicle. Automotive oils are heavily advertised in the press and on television, and you can learn about their properties from specialised literature. Choosing lubricants, much like choosing a hotel in St. Petersburg or any other city, comes down to the balance of price and quality that suits the buyer best. But while when picking a hotel you go by your own preferences, an engine oil should be chosen based on the vehicle's characteristics.

If you're choosing lubricants for a truck, the first thing to bear in mind is exactly which types and grades of oil its manufacturer recommends. This matters especially if the vehicle is new and still under warranty, since if a fault arises that's linked to using an oil other than the recommended one, the workshop has the right to refuse a warranty repair, and you'll have to pay to fix it yourself.

If your truck is between one and five years old, the best choice is a synthetic oil. It will extend the vehicle's normal service life and reduce wear on the engine and transmission. Naturally, good-quality synthetic oil isn't cheap, but it will save you a good deal on repairs.

For trucks between five and ten years old, using a cheaper semi-synthetic engine oil with additives is perfectly acceptable. Its performance characteristics are usually somewhat behind those of expensive synthetics, but from a financial standpoint using it makes more sense, since as engine wear increases the oil needs to be changed more often anyway.

But if a truck is more than ten years old, using synthetic or semi-synthetic oil no longer makes sense, since the vehicle, as they say, is "living out its days" at that point. The best choice in this case is an inexpensive mineral oil.