While swinging by my local dealership for my 4th battery in 2 years, they tell me "the oil change interval has now been adjusted on all Defenders to 10k miles or 1 year because they're have been too many engine failures".

He proceeds to print a paper "from Topix" showing this.

I'm somehow locked out of Topix at the moment and this seems very sketchy.

​​​​​Can anyone confirm this with certainty either way?

 

I haven't heard of this, but it only makes sense. Anyone that has owned a car should know that 21k intervals are dumb, no matter how good synthetic oils have become. 10k is the absolute maximum one should go.

 

There is absolutely no way I would ever wait 20k miles to change oil. 5k-7.5k is my interval window for recurring oil changes after break-in oil change, which I did around 1.2k miles on the clock.

 

No offense to those who have replied but I wasn't seeking old man oil change opinions. I'm looking for a definitive answer from someone who can get into Topix as I'm locked out for the moment.

I believe there is very little chance this story from the service advisor is true. At the least, LR would have had to notify owners and something would surely come up in Google search.

 

Very possible it's fabricated, given shorter interval = more dealer visits = more $$$

 

Also, more blown up engines = more warranty costs for JLR. Oil is cheap, and they'll still charge you for oil changes.

 

I just texted the head of service (runs the place) at my local JLR dealer about this. Will let you know what they say. They're holding my L663 captive in service, this gave me a nice excuse to remind the dealer of my existence.

EDIT: Answer came right back. My source tells me that there is indeed now a 10,500 or 12 mos service internal but it is only for a "coolant top off and pressure test". Not for an oil change. I re-asked and they confirmed again back - it's definitely not an oil interval schedule change. Also, not sure if that goes back to 2020/2021/2022/2023/2024 MY.

So, that is perhaps where the confusion came from.

I find this a tacit admission by JLR that these things do lose / burn coolant and they don't know why and the coolant loss is ... well somewhat normal. I've had to add coolant to mine since it has been new. "Operating as normal". So... that is very interesting that they are now bringing them in more regularly just for this.

 

Posted on NHTSA site:

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/20...08469-0001.pdf

 

That's fascinating. So they are saying through N892 they are going to cover an engine oil change UNDER WARRANTY via a service campaign for the 4 cylinder engines in the USA? That's pretty unusual. Also completely different than whatever my service person told me about the coolant test and refill. Seems all a bit of... house of cards?

 

I've spent ~25 years in national retail and now commercial vehicle dealerships. There is a HUGE shift going on from planned maintenance to predictive maintenance. It's currently the biggest hype of the value of telematics and almost everyone is chasing it. For decades, we've all dealt with planned maintenance of our vehicles: at x miles or y months of use under 1 or 2 conditions, you perform a periodic maintenance. There are oil change intervals, brake intervals, coolant intervals, yada yada yada. It's kind of expensive to just do it in a cycle if your vehicle doesn't need to. Started by commercial fleets, there's a push to do it based on the sensors in the vehicle. This is predictive maintenance. If you are in west Texas hauling across gravel and surging loads - maybe you should change oil more frequently. Long haul trucks with consistent speeds - perhaps later. The former saves crazy engine costs because it needs more frequent oil changes and the later saves money because you aren't doing it in a planned cycle. You get the idea.

What I read in that N892 Service Action is this is what JLR is doing! This Service Action likely isn't for everyone to come in and get an oil change. They looked at the planned maintenance of 20,000 miles and said "woah!" Based on whatever sensors, that owner needs an earlier oil change. The telematics embedded into every vehicle started out as a way for the engineers to get early info so that they could inform the manufacturing process of emerging engineering/warranty issues. Huge savings for the manufacturers. In this case, it's alerting that this predictive maintenance for this vehicle (was it a Defender?) could use an early oil change to prevent bigger problems down the road. Their huge collection of data sees something coming. If I got one of those - I'd be changing that oil because the engine problem that they are seeing may come "after" the warranty.

I don't see this as a change in the planned maintenance, just a targeted user based on the individual diagnostics. And yeah, it could be tripping on more vehicles based on their data and likely there will be an increase. But I suspect the Pricing PhD's & accountants are still predicting that the 20k oil change with a large number of Service Actions based on telematics is still more cost effective to them. Me - as a long term planned owner - I'm going to be doing the planned maintenance more frequently than they recommend because I have no idea if they would be incented to inform me of predictive maintenance after a warranty period....

Good luck and keep us informed if the Service Center says anything about it.