Last updated: Jun 18, 2024 Renan Rezende
I’m an engineer who worked for Petronas back in 2016 in the lubricants division. One thing I can tell you is that 99.9% of the population (including mechanics) have no knowledge about lubricants. Everyone has guesses. My first advice is: Don’t trust other people’s guesses.
My division had one of the 5 main labs of the company around the world. You could check every single thing related to the fluids we produced.
Now going back to you question:
If you put a 5W30 instead of 5W20, you won’t notice anything instantly, but it will speed up the wear and tear of the engine system. It will also overload the oil pump, as it was designed to work with the 5W20 oil. The pump will have to work around 40% more to move the oil around.
As I said, you wouldn’t see anything catastrophic happening, but it’s far from ideal. It’s like inflation. If you print tons of money now, you will start to see the consequences in a few years and you might not be able to tell where the problem started. If this was my car, I would replace the oil, specially if you like the car.
Just a few more things for people who are interested. If your car asks for 5W20 and you get 0W20, this is completely fine, as the number before the W refers to the viscosity of the oil before the engine heats up. The lower the number, the less will its viscosity be and therefore, the quicker the oil will fill all the necessary areas in the engine, reducing the friction. But this will be a more expensive oil.
The other thing is that at the time, I had a Honda Civic 2008 and used it as an experiment to see if I really needed to change the oil like the manufacturer said (every 10k km or 1 year). Every oil change I would collect the oil and take it to the lab to analyse it. The oil is like the blood of the car. The tests show a range of important information such as if the oil still maintains its original characteristics based on a large number of parameters and detection of small metal particles coming from the engine.
I started testing it at 10,000km. The car was already 8 years old. The oil was still in spec and no metal particles detected. Tested again at 12,500. Same result. Tested again at 15,000. The oil went to the lower range of the acceptable characteristics but was still within spec. With 17,500 the oil finally showed characteristics of an oil that needed to be changed, but was still in working condition.
Keep in mind that lots of factors can influence these results, specially the car brand and it’s engine system quality.
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