Your driving environment could well explain the rapid decline in the oil life percentage; just follow the monitor and replace the oil once you're below 10-15%.

 

Driving habits make a big difference. That's the cool thing about the oil life monitor.

It calculates your oil life based on all kinds of things like how many times you start the engine, how cold when you start it, how much you push it before the oil warms up, how many total revolutions, how much time you spend on the fun side of the tach, and a bunch of others.

The ECU basically keeps a detailed diary of all that, which is a lot better than simply having a table for "normal" vs. "severe" driving with little or no clear definition of what makes up "severe".

 

The thing is, most of us are in the "severe" range according to the owners manual.

 

When in reality, unless you're doing lots of frequent starts, short trips, or very highspeed driving, almost none of us are in the "severe" category.

 

Well, in reality we constantly switch from severe to normal & back all the time. Nobody can figure out if their driving habits are 90% severe one day, maybe 30% severe the next day, then you drive 800 miles on the interstate so it's normal or even lower, & it's different each day. I know I'm far too lazy to keep track of that myself.

 

When I bought my 530i back in 2002 I picked it up in Munich and my wife and I spent two weeks bombing around Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg; we ended up driving over 2,000 miles, much of it over 100 mph. When BMW's OLM recommended I have first oil change performed at 13,000 miles I wasn't at all surprised (15,000 miles is the benchmark), however, when the second oil change recommendation popped up after an additional 17,000 miles I was surprised indeed. Much of that mileage had been spent driving in the metropolitan areas of Boston and New York City.

 

I bet that was fun. We thought about picking up one of our cars in Sweden but we kept saying "next time...".

On our Saabs, I've noticed longer intervals if we drive somewhere on vacation. US interstates, so it's not 100mph. But its 250 to 300 miles between stop & restart the engine.

 

Funny story, we were tooling down the Autobahn with the cruise control set at something like 130 mph when an S600 and a 911 derivative blew by us doing an easy "buck-eighty"; my wife had been reading a book or something and she jumped a bit and said, "What was that?" I told her which cars had passed us and about how fast I thought they were moving and then she asked the fatal question, "How fast are we going?"

"Uhhh..."

 

I have a 2018 Accord 1.5T with almost 4,400 miles the oil life is at 50%. My sales person has told me to wait until it gets to 15% and then call and schedule it for service. This is my second Accord usually changes were done at 5,000 miles but my previous Accord was a 2004 Ex. At this rate I will be way over 5,000 miles before I get down to 15% could there be something wrong with the car's calculation? I don't want to change it too early but don't want to damage the engine either.