I'm not doubting the collective wisdom of you folks that want to use car oils, but.... My comments were made based on fancy propaganda and test data that people at Motul, Maxima and Spectro oils showed me back when I was working in a motorcycle shop. This was also reinforced by Honda and Suzuki when I went to their tech schools. No doubt these people had a vested interest in selling their product, call me successfully brainwashed.

I would love to see a test of two China moto's and the LONG term effects of auto vs moto oils, then we would have data and not opinion. Being that we have no (few?) members here with high mileage China motos, (say 50,000 km) it's rather difficult to know what the long term effects or financial benefits of car oil is. It would be interesting to have a few motorcycle taxis run various brands and blends and then tear down the engines after a couple years for a comparison.

That said, I'm a little puzzled with folks that live in free market economies and have access to perfectly good motorcycle oil at reasonable prices. I agree with CC when he talks about lack of choice in the wilds of China, but hey, I just bought 4 quarts of PJ1 Silverfire 4-Stroke Premium in Hong Kong for $27.00 USD. Perfectly good stuff for my QingQi and Galaxy motos, less than $7.00 USD per oil change, and I can sleep well not worrying about having the wrong kind of oil floating around my crankcase. Heck, even most of the Wall-marts, Metro, and Carrefour stores here in China have Shell Petroleum Motorcycle oil for $7.00 USD per liter.

I do pay about $100.00 USD for the good stuff in my V-Strom, but again, it's probably because I'm brainwashed into thinking that she deserves a high quality synthetic motorcycle oil. And I don't really trust the local brands, as I have seen what they put in the milk here, so I can't imagine what they do to oil. I have tried local oil like the red shell in my car and it usually comes out like something from Starbucks, thin and black with foam on top after only 5000 kilometers, so again, I usually pick up a gallon of whatever import is on sale at Wall-mart etc.

Just my 2 cents... the kind of people that read these threads aren't usually going to suffer from oil issues as they actually maintain they're bikes and frequently change their oil. When I did my first USA tour back before I knew anything about motorcycles, I ran 18,000 miles on one change of Golden Spectro motorcycle oil and that bike was still running fine after I sold it with 45,000 miles. Was it the oil... who knows Moral of the story is that I was very poor but I got 4 times the life out of oil that was 4 times the price of the cheap stuff. Discount the labor and oil filters, and I probably saved money by running very expensive oil.

Cheers!
ChinaV