How Do You Get a BMW to Outlast a Lexus? Drain ALL of the OIL!!!
Lexus is often seen as being more reliable than its German competition. Does this pointless no-oil test prove otherwise?
The Lexus LS430 and BMW 735i are two V8-powered luxury sedans that were direct competitors when they were new and remain so on the used market. And if you are looking at buying one now when the warranty has long since run out, you want to know which will be the most reliable. Naturally, everyone assumes it would be the Lexus, but is that really true? What if you drained all the oil out of each car and ran them that way to see which would die first? Would that prove anything to you?
This is why YouTubers can’t have nice things.
Matt Watson from carwow recently posted a video doing just that. A BMW 735i and a Lexus LS430 both had their V8 engines drained of all their oil and were then started and ran to see which would die first. How long would they run? Would the engines actually explode? And does this video prove anything besides YouTubers like to destroy things for fun and profit?
No Oil (Sadly, Yes)
It is funny because a common discussion among auto enthusiasts on social platforms is which oil is the best. Is Mobil 1 better than Castrol GTX? Can I just dump in a quart of generic stuff from my local Napa store? Well, that debate will likely rage on forever. But one thing we can tell you is to make sure you have at least SOME oil in your car. All those lovely pistons, rods, bearings, and valves will quickly generate a lot of heat without the benefit of lubricating oil. Then metal begins to bang into metal and very bad things happen.
BMW versus Lexus
So in this video, we see that after the oil is drained from the cars, the BMW runs much longer and harder than the Lexus does. Finally, the BMW fans have something to gloat about over the Lexus fans. But do they? True the BMW engine lasted longer, but in the real world, this test has no real value. It would be an extremely rare circumstance for an engine to lose all of its oil. And even the winning BMW lasted only about seven and a half minutes before it became a grenade. You won’t be travelling very far in that amount of time. Although to be fair it is substantially longer than the Lexus’ one minute twenty seconds. Does this prove that BMW makes stronger engines?
Failed Test
Besides this being a test of a situation that would almost never occur in the real world we also need to keep in mind this was one test and far from scientific. We have no idea how many miles each engine had on it when tested. We have no idea how each car was serviced during its lifetime. And this is only a single result. A single result does not a trend make. If we did feel that running an engine with no oil was a valid test to determine who made the better engine, we would have to test a lot more engines under much more controlled circumstances to draw any meaningful conclusions. So let the BMW crowd have their fun and crow about their ‘more reliable engines.’ Much like a daily horoscope, we believe this video is for entertainment purposes only.
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