voluntarily or involuntarily?

dealers, no.  experienced professionals, yes.

suspicious????  suspicions based on what?  have you researched this
subject and found this system to be defective?

no, but it doesn't need them.  all it needs is an ecu with sufficient
smarts and memory to figure out whether you're doing 10k miles on a
freeway or 2k miles with the engine never getting into closed loop
injection mode.

the ecu has ooooodles of excess computing capacity - it's a no-brainer.

eh?  i wish mine did it.

honda dealers had /zero/ influence on programming it.  left to dealers,
you'd only be able to use honda gasoline, honda tires and you'd need the
oil changing ever other weekend.

why didn't you buy a ford and do that experiment then?  i've worked on
enough of them to know your speculation is unfounded.

bottom line, if don't want to pay attention to the owner manual or the
experience of pros, you go ahead and do your own thing.  particularly
the use of standard non-honda power steering fluid - i bet i can predict
the mechanical outcome and the validity of your warranty.

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:31:39 -0600, rpms0605 wrote:

None.  The maintenance minder uses the computer to determine the way you
drive (RPM's, speed, stop and go, etc) and works out the best time to
change your oil.  It will likely be far less frequently than it would have
been otherwise (for most people).

For instance, on my '06 Civic Si, I have changed the oil twice.  First
time was at around 6,000 miles, second time around 12,000.  Now, if I were
following most standard oil change intervals, it would have been done
every 3,000.

Not to mention that the oil is the one thing that you don't really have to
worry about using Honda.  I use Valvoline Durablend from an oil change
place.

Not likely.

How on earth would being a mechanical engineer elevate the
value of an assumption here, and a rather gross one at that?

If you google, which at a minimum you should have, you will
learn that the maintenance minder system is a lot more
complicated than your totally non-engineering guess.

How can you call this realistic without identifying whether
there are major differences in each design's (Honda's and
Ford's) engineering?

It doesn't have to.

The Honda engineers know the effects of a wide variety of driving
conditions on their components, and take those driving conditions into
account as they calculate the maintenance intervals.

Lots of cold starts with short trips and high RPMs while cold signifies
one style of driving which would indicate short maintenance intervals,
while lots of long highway drives in moderate conditions with very few
stops and starts would indicate a completely different maintenance
interval.

You're suspicious because you haven't read up on the technology.

The algorithms, once decided upon, are applicable to ALL their cars with
very little tweaking.  So the expense for any individual car is minimal.

And in the highly competitive auto market, this kind of thing is
necessary.

Let me put to you a similar question:  do you think it makes economic
sense for Honda to put every occupant safety device and mechanism they
can into even their cheapest Civic DX?  Because that's what they're
doing.  A few years ago they announced with quite a bit of fanfare that
they have stopped the practice of giving out more safety features only
to higher priced cars and leaving lower priced cars with fewer safety
features.  As they engineer a model, they are putting into it every
safety feature that's available at the time, whether it's a $17,000
Civic or a $60,000 RL.

Welcome to the world of competitive auto sales.

You so, SO badly don't want this maintenance minder to be real, you'll
grab onto anything.  You SO want your own knowledge to be superior to
that of the engineers who built the car.  Why?

So?  Are you an engineer with Honda?  Did you engineer anything for
Honda?  Do you have any factual evidence that the programming for
Honda's maintenance minder algorithms is in direct contradiction with
the requirements of the Honda engineers who engineered the mechanical
system in question?

Hmmmmm.  I wonder how many mechanical engineers "guess" at something
like this and then STOP without delving into it any further.

Please let me know about any bridges or anything else you've had a hand
in.  I want to know what to avoid.

Actually, cars are sold nowadays based on how LITTLE maintenance they
need.  Maintenance intervals are a HUGE marketing item, with "100,000
mile tuneups!" getting big headlines in the ads.

The MM isn't programmed based on what the dealers want; it's programmed,
if anything, based on its ability to keep people OUT of the dealership.

Please note that if you blindly take your car into the dealership and
tell them, "My maintenance minder says Service A," the dealership will
have his own, non-Honda list of "Service A" items--which is unrelated to
the owner's manual, but which IS related to the dealership's pocket.  
They make money off of people NOT reading the owner's manual.

Let me repeat this:  dealership service departments make money from
people NOT reading the owner's manual.

And if you spend any time around here at all, you'll see HUGE numbers of
people asking questions that are answered DIRECTLY by the owner's
manual.  In other words, there are plenty of non-readers for the
dealership to profit from.

But the smart owner sees "Service A" on the minder, looks it up, and
asks for those services to be performed--whether at a dealer or at an
independent shop.

Or he performs them himself.

"Realistically, if I changed my brake fluid every 30,000 miles (as
recommended in the manual) and changed my oil/transmission fluid/
coolant whenever the dealer or Maintenance Minder advised me, well my
Ford would last forever, too."

Is that a bad thing? Isn't the basis of any car performance, safety,
and RELIABILITY?

What a lot of Honda dealers in my area are doing now is making all
maintence-minder requested service free for cars bought at their
dealership. I got my 2007 Ody at Schaefer and Strohminger Honda in
Fallston, MD, and I won't have to pay for any service the maintence
minder requests until I reach 120,000 miles -- that's at least a good
eight years for me.

Not mine. I just happen to own a Honda. And I happen to trust Honda's
judgement better than my own, for the most part.

High-end cars like Mercedes actually do now have sensors that sample oil
quality and recommend replacement based on an actual analysis.

Honda and most other makers do it by calculation. The calculations are
arrived at by considering driving habits and ambient temperatures. The
algorithms used are fairly sophisticated.

Your objection sounds like the ones expressed by steel-furnace men a
hundred years ago, when pyrometers were being introduced to help better
control furnace temperatures. The furnace men were insulted, figuring
they were being told they didn't know what they were doing. Of course,
it turned out the pyrometers were far more accurate than human eyes,
which is why all furnaces mow have pyrometers.

None at all. Honda assumes the dealers are following factory procedure,
which may or may not actually be the case. Honda and its dealers have a
love-hate relationship.

Mercedes got into trouble a few years ago for just this. The oil
monitoring system of the time was expecting factory-specific synthetic
oil, but the dealers were installing regular oil. The result was heavy
sludging and a class-action lawsuit.

Honda dealers are independent companies that have purchased a Honda
franchise from Honda. They are under no obligation to use Honda repair
parts, use Honda tools or follow Honda procedures. This is one reason
you'll find wide variance in dealer quality.