When should I get an oil change?

Post date: 2021-07-23 09:33:17

We bought a car we rarely drive. When should we change the oil?

We bought a used car (2017 Mini Cooper S) back in August 2020. This is the first car we've owned in over a decade, and I'm not sure how the maintenance schedule for our particular usage model works. We drive the car maaaaaaybe 40 (forty) miles a month on average, and about once a month or every six weeks go a little further afield (maybe 100 miles round trip or so).

When we bought the car, it had an oil change done, I think, a couple months previous to our taking delivery (it had been sitting on the lot for a while before we bought it). The dealer's schedule said that we should get the oil changed at 34,000 miles or in January 2021. I took the car out today for the first time in a week, and I noticed we're just now getting close to 29K miles, and it's almost August. The car seems to be running fine for as little as we run it. At the rate we're going, we won't hit that 34,000 mile mark until sometime in like 2024-2025.

I'm not naive enough to think we can wait three more years to change oil that was last changed in 2020, so I guess my question is, at this point, how long can we go before we do need to change the oil? Given how little we drive it, is there any risk in waiting a few more months or a year before we change it again?

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