Oil Sell by date???

bigasotonuk

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Hi,
As some of you maybe aware I have recently bought an additional car to my fleet, a Cabriolet Audi A4 Quattro Sport 3.0TDI six speed manual.
As soon as I bought it I put it in for a full major service, all filters replaced, brake fluid change with a local VAG indy, now my Audi operates a similar service interval as my AMG 20,000 miles or 2 years as its on this service regime and has a DPF it requires a special oil which is Quantum Longlife 3 0w 5w, (fully synthetic) the oil alone was approaching £100 for the service.
As I,m sure I would require some for a top up over the 20k miles I tried to buy this make oil everywhere but it seems that it is only sold by VAG dealers and TPS, they wanted £90ish for 5 litres, though I managed to negotiate this to £65, but I found the exact same oil on E-bay from a seller that appears to be a Volkswagon dealer for £26.99 delivered.
I looked on the container to find a sell by date, which was the end of April this year, I have spoken to a VAG tech and he assured me that the date was not an issue and it would be ok to use, but it got me to thinking why would oil even have a sell by date, for what reasons? I could understand if it possibly was in degradable container. Any Ideas?
 

television

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Never heard of this ever Andy, the dealers top up their tanks all the time and the oil in the bottom could have been there years, these container are sealed in a way.
 

wemorgan

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Some dealers like to spin a yarn about how special their oil is and therefore why it's so expensive. But you can simply ask for the required specification and buy a compatible oil from almost any retailer for a fraction of the price.
 

47p2

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I had a phone call from TPS last week offering me oil for £12.99 per 5 litres
 

Xtractorfan

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TPS have a habit of doing special offers ever now and then, wiper blades a few months ago were cheap as chips
 

EmilysDad

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Oil is only a few million years old :rolleyes: ...... I can't see another couple of years sat on a shelf making much difference :lol: :lol: :lol:

I would imagine dates are just for stock control. :confused:
 

Rory

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Oil is only a few million years old :rolleyes: ...... I can't see another couple of years sat on a shelf making much difference :lol: :lol: :lol:

Fully synth oil will be brand new. ;)

Considering what it goes through in an engine, I can't see shelf life being an issue at all.
 

grober

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Engine oil is a highly refined product consisting of a blend of many different chemicals. These will have required considerable energy to produce in their present form. Due the process of entropy these will inevitably degrade with time. First to go I imagine would be any reactive species such as detergents to mop up all that crap/fuel that gets past the piston rings in high compression turbo diesels that might degrade the lubricating properties of the oil. Leave a modern oil on the shelf for several years and its conceivable its performance will be less than optimum especially if used in an extended service interval regime. Perhaps a pragmatic approach to "out of date" oil would be to shorten its change interval. Or as Dirty Harry might say " Well do ya feel lucky punk? ;)
 

cleverdicky

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If your worried the date and the different chemicals 'settleing', just give the bottle a shake before you use it ;)
 
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bigasotonuk

bigasotonuk

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Cheers for the replies guys. To be honest, as I spoke to the Audi Tech, and from what I have read on here, and the fact that it is only six weeks out of date I think I will use it.
 

SL63 Mark

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Cheers for the replies guys. To be honest, as I spoke to the Audi Tech, and from what I have read on here, and the fact that it is only six weeks out of date I think I will use it.

Sounds like a good plan.
 

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