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It has taken me 14 1/2 years years and 219,000 miles but I have solved the Toyota oil sludge mystery. I do my own maintenance and my car a 2004 Toyota corolla was coming up for it's spark plug maintenance interval I changed the original set at 120,000 miles. This time at 219,000 miles I'm changing them a little early Because I figure next time at 300,000 I'll let someone else change them. So the bottom line is the number 3 spark plug well has oil in it which means the valve cover gasket has failed. This is not a big deal because there is no rough idle or loss of power and no codes and the perimeter gasket has not leaked a drop. So I proceed with changing the 20 dollar valve cover gasket and it's the first time this valve cover has been off. Guess what no sludge, none, zero. Now this takes me back to 2015 when the oil light came on and it turned out to be a pan full of sludge, that cost me a 10 dollar pan gasket and some elbow grease. The oil change intervals on this car have been 3000 miles since the day it was new, never missed one. The lesson in this is that the oil filters had failed and the 3000 mile oil change interval kept the sludge flowing to the pan. More evidence of this is the grit I found on the oil control filter which protects the Variable Valve Timing system. Try and find the oil control filter in your owners manual for when it should be serviced Ha, Ha. Talk about the most well hidden secret in the car industry. So here is the challenge. Incorporate a oil filter fault (bypass detector) a little more sophisticated then the existing oil light or the pressure gauge and every car will easily do 300.000 with normal maintenance. Think about it, just a mechanical pop out indicator similar to an electric motor overload reset or a temperature color change indicator incorporated onto the oil filter paint would do and not increase the cost of an oil filter by much. Bring it to shark tank and your an instant billionaire. Good luck
Toyota for decades has had sludge issues and it's due to the crappy engine designs. You'd think for as popular as the Toyotas are that it wouldn't be a problem. Truth is, rarely will any Toyota engine ever make the Wards Ten Best list. Toyota uses the oil as a coolant as do other car makers. But they push the envelop to the max and don't provide near enough evacuation of the condensate which causes the sludge to begin with. It's a design defect. The fix is don't buy one from the start and it won't be a problem. FWIW, Toyota has replaced 2 of the engines in my brothers vehicles due to sludge and all he uses is Mobil One.
It's actually an inadequate description of the problem on my part by me referring to sludge as the problem. In pulling the valve cover yesterday for the first time and seeing a very clean area I knew for 14 1/4 years those oil changes at 3000 miles did a good job. On the other hand what I called sludge is incorrect terminology. What brought me to this problem was an oil light 3 years ago at 150,000 miles. After dropping the pan I pulled out handfuls of what I'll now call mud. I now know that mud was the combination normal metal fragments which collect in properly working oil filters and make them abnormally heavy after doing their job. In my case the oil filter failed and the by-pass-mode allowed the heavy metal to find it's way to the pan. I now use Mobil 1 motor oil and have changed to a higher quality filter. The fact that the car uses no oil after 220,000 and get 40 mpg on the highway is fine with me. All is good Thank you.
Toyota for decades has had sludge issues and it's due to the crappy engine designs. You'd think for as popular as the Toyotas are that it wouldn't be a problem. Truth is, rarely will any Toyota engine ever make the Wards Ten Best list. Toyota uses the oil as a coolant as do other car makers. But they push the envelop to the max and don't provide near enough evacuation of the condensate which causes the sludge to begin with. It's a design defect. The fix is don't buy one from the start and it won't be a problem. FWIW, Toyota has replaced 2 of the engines in my brothers vehicles due to sludge and all he uses is Mobil One.
They have sludge issues because of lack of proper oil changes not design of their engines other than the fact their engines have tighter tolerances than others. Many of their engines have been and still are some of the most reliable out there as long as you keep up with maintenance. I have now had 4 Toyotas and have never had a sludge issue and I know of many Toyota owners who have never had a sludge issue.
Actually, you touched on a very interesting problem with literally all oil filters on the market. They all have cold start bypass valve - that allows cold dirty oil to run past the filter into the engine, so that "engine is not starved of oil at initial RPMs". Like I said, every filter out there has that valve. Russians came up with a filter that fixes this issue, but that's in Russia and in development stage. Forgot the name, something like Granit filter or similar. I watched their video on YT, that's how I found about the bypass valve.
Thanks for the tip. That's what I am looking for. Pop in a couple of sensors for pressure and temperature add an operator warning timed to shut it down the whole works safely, Sent the data into obd2 and or the phone and save a bunch of engines.
It's my fault the conversation was moved. I didn't realize that model specific automotive treads existed for my Toyota post.
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