When I bought my FEH in April, the oil life monitor stated there was 74% left. THe car had 21 miles on it. I'm guessing the truck sat a while before I came along, which might explain why I was able to get such a good deal. Now, with 3450 miles on it it says 58% left.
Now, I am generally not as good at math as computers are, but doesn't this seem a little bit off? If I'm supposed to get 10,000 miles or 12 months, shouldn't I still be in the mid-sixties range? Or does the first fill up of oil run out a bit faster as the engine gets broken in and the engine gets "seasoned?"

As far as I know on the 04-07's the oil life monitor is strictly a miles driven countdown. It can also be set (if I recall) to several numbers of your choosing....5,000....7,500....10,000. I have no idea how yours got to those odd percentages. Have you tried looking it up in the manual?

-Tim

2006 Mercury Mariner Hybrid AWD
Black with Pebble interior
Premium Package with Nav & Moonroof



Current ODO: 26,152
Typical Drive: 20 min crosstown in heavy traffic (3.5mi there and back twice a day)


532 Gallons of gas saved
That's 10,642 lbs less CO2 emitted

In the '08 manual, go to page 73 - Driver Controls. It shows you how to reset the "oil life" percentage. It starts by resetting it to 100%, but if you keep hitting "Reset" it will drop it down 10% each time you push the button to get to the percentage you want (rounded to the nearest 10 of course).

You actually need to do this manually at each oil change - basically it's just a glorified trip odometer.

I'd bet that someone who test drove it messed around with resetting the percentage and maybe left it on 80% before you picked it up.

I don't think its settable... its fixed at 10,000 (or 12months whichever comes first) as far as I can tell. I agree with the other poster... someone reset your counter while they were messing with the controls.

I've had mine for 32000 miles.. its a 10,000 mile counter just as it says in the manual (mines an '06 others could be different I suppose but doubt it).

If it was a 10,000 mile countdown that you can manually reduce by a certain %.....technically wouldn't that make it settable? Not to get into semantics...

If I reset it to the standard 10,000mi interval, then hit reset until it was at 80%, that would give me 8,000mi intervals, and so on.

Regardless, I still don't see how mathematically 21 miles could be at 74% if it goes down in increments of 10%. I could see 5% increments maybe....if someone set it at 75% and drove it a little the system would probably round down to 74%. Likewise if it was set to 75%, 3,150miles would be closer to 58% remaining not 3,450. Looks like a mystery.....where's Scooby and the gang???

-Tim

2006 Mercury Mariner Hybrid AWD
Black with Pebble interior
Premium Package with Nav & Moonroof



Current ODO: 26,152
Typical Drive: 20 min crosstown in heavy traffic (3.5mi there and back twice a day)


532 Gallons of gas saved
That's 10,642 lbs less CO2 emitted

The manual also mentions that it's time-based too.

From the manual: "Note: Oil life start value 100% equals 10,000 miles (16,000km) or 12 months. For example, setting oil life start value to 60% sets the oil life start value to 6,000 miles (9,600km) and 219 days."

Looks like there must be some combination of the two - so maybe when it sat for a while the % was time-driven and then after she got it and drove it around it started to become milage-driven. Or maybe it's driven by whichever function is governing at the time - if you drive a lot of miles and would drive more than 10k in a year, it's milage driven; if you don't drive a lot of miles it would be time driven. "10,000 miles or 12 months, whichever comes first."

It also sounds to me that the 2008 is more sophisticated than the 2006-07's.

I suppose it doesn't really make sense that there should even be an oil life monitor; how hard is it to remember 10,000 miles or 12 months? I'll just change the oil in January, which is when the label says it was built.

I agree, some of these "features" are just plain stupid in my book.

If you can't figure out when to do an oil change without this, you probably shouldn't be driving at all...........

~John

Pictures of a few of the modifications I have made to the truck:

http://www.pbase.com/jmorton10/inbox&page=all

What happens a lot (for me at least) is that you end up changing a bit early or late once and a while so you can quickly end up not having it simply be at every 10,000 by the odometer. My dealer puts a sticker on the windshield but it is for 5,000km (3,100 mi) or 3 moths (and I get a reminder call as well)! I forgot to bring that up at the last oil change.

Cheers,

Roch