FitsMe

How does the oil monitor work? Does it measure viscosity somehow? If not, how trustworthy is this oil monitor and will it take "synthetic vs. standard" into account?

jmarshall098

Oil monitors function almost similarly in all the vehicles. They predict the life of oil based engine condition, remaining amount of oil, operating temperature and other driving factors through the ECU and then decide the time for changing the oil. As far as I know, the monitor has nothing to with synthetic oil or standard oil. However, due to resistive properties of synthetic oil, it will definitely affect the monitor to delay the oil changing time, but it would be inappropriate to rely on that alone factor. Also, synthetic oil although has good life period, it is better to use standard oil in your engine as synthetic oil is only slightly efficient than the standard one. I would suggest you not to spend extra on such oils.
Hope this info helps you,

FitsMe

I don't think I'll ever get synthetic but I was just wondering how the oil monitor works. It would have been nice if they had somehow installed a rheometer to measure viscosity characteristics.
Thanks for the reply, I guess I'll just change oil according to the oil monitor's schedule