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- 2022 2.5GT
Back to back full throttle pulls during the early stages of the cars life is what will cause your engine to burn oil or premature wear on your transmission. As long as you avoid repeated redlines, you're good to go. By varying the rpms, they mean city driving where you are constantly revving to 3000rpm or so. That's the best way to break in your engine.
If anything, manufacturers like BMW want you to be hard on the car when it's new, change your engine oil every 15k and never change your transmission fluid at all which causes premature wear, in hopes of you bringing your car into the dealer so they make money off the repair. There certainly is two sides to this argument.
I don't think you should baby your car when it's new, but you can't be tracking it and thoroughly putting everything through its paces either. It has to be somewhere in between for optimal results.
If there is in fact a fault with the engine or transmission, believe me, it will fail on you well before your warranty expires even if you baby the car from new.
What exactly do you suppose happens to an engine to "cause" it to burn oil if you use full throttle early on in its life? I was careful with mine for the first couple of hundred then moved progressively towards normal driving and if that included overtaking then that's what it got. Modern engines are built to such fine tolerances that there is no longer a need to knock the high spots off metal parts or free a tight engine or other parts of the powertrain. I can absolutely guarantee that company and rental cars get no running in period and I'm not aware that they are guaranteed to burn oil.
Whether an engine uses oil is down to inherent design, tolerance "stack" and the type of oil it is filled with (modern synthetic oils are very effective at clinging to surfaces and can get past oil control rings into the upper cylinder where it is burned). I thought there would be no end to oil dilution on the Skyactive diesel but so far at 1800 miles, the oil is pinned to exactly the same spot as the day it came. That means not being used, not being diluted or I suppose without measuring the viscosity and composition of an oil sample, that by amazing coincidence that both are occurring at the same rate. The revised engine has brand new pistons and rings and having been a vehicle development engineer for most of my life, I believe that these piston changes are the stand alone factor in whether it uses oil and only slight bedding of the piston rings during a short bedding period (of the almost imperceptible machining marks left from production) will serve to reduce any initial oil consumption, not increase it. In my case, the position of the oil is too vague on the stick to be precise but I'm happy to report that the oil level has not changed on my 2017 diesel. It's a remarkable improvement in design and nothing to do with how it has been driven as I've done nothing different.
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