Does Lab-Tested Equal Installer-Worthy?

by Patrick Sullivan
NOLN Contributing Writer

Many of today’s offerings in the automotive aftermarket promote spin-on and cartridge oil filter programs that provide professional installers with a comprehensive offering to cover all popular makes and models. What many installers may not realize is that the spin-on oil filters that they use daily are virtually the same filter in many of their design characteristics, leading to the inevitable question: Why can’t the oil filter manufacturers provide us with just one filter that can work for almost every car we service? The answer may not be too far from reality, but there is some complexity to this issue that needs to be addressed up front.

USCAR Spec’s Revolutionary Initiative The USCAR Spec, as part of the larger United States Council for Automotive Research (or USCAR; learn more at www.uscar.org), the umbrella group for collaborative research between Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, has announced a revolutionary initiative to standardize the spin-on oil filter that will be used on new and in-development platforms across the Detroit Three nameplates.

Filter size and in-stock (SKU) rationalization has been slow to evolve over the years for interconnected reasons:

1. Original Equipment (OE) designs have always focused on fit and need for their specific OE platforms.

2. A desire by OE service providers to match like-for-like on these released OE offerings.

3. The desire of the professional installer (aftermarket) to provide equal or better quality on their offering, making the need for an “OE appearance,” including numbering, vitally important.

These three perspectives have been mutually exclusive for many years, and it is not an easy proposition to change them overnight.

Economics and global competitiveness over the past few years, however, have begun to open some eyes at many levels. The trends by the OE manufacturers have certainly been down the path of “lighter,” “as efficient as ever” and “economical.” Focusing on those key buzzwords, it is easy to understand how cartridge oil filters have become so prevalent in today’s platforms. Cartridge elements, as their name implies, eliminate the use of costly steel casings and center tubes, and require only a lightweight, replaceable paper element inside a fixed oil filter housing to perform the same critical cleaning of oil at the same or longer drain intervals.

The media is everything! To that end, OE manufacturers of spin-on oil filters have begun a “size rationalization” that focuses less on the size of the filter and the quantity of filter paper and more on the efficiency of the filter, combined with a smaller footprint and lower SKU count. This radical new philosophy by the OEs and their manufacturing partners opens the door to a new understanding about the true functionality of the standard spin-on oil filter: size matters less than the quality of the filter media inside the can. In essence, when it comes to today’s oil filter, the media is everything!

Filter manufacturers, in close working relationship with the OEs, have begun the first phase release of these changes to the service market and the aftermarket. Today’s reduction in size and SKU count is being driven by common thread sizes (e.g. 22-mm metric or 3/4-inch English) and common outer gasket diameters.

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