But here’s why we may not offer a filter for your vehicle
Mark Nyholm | TECHNICAL MANAGER, HEAVY DUTY AND MECHANICAL R&D
I field a lot of questions here at AMSOIL. One that comes up from time to time is, “Why doesn’t AMSOIL offer an Ea Oil Filter for my vehicle?”
Quite often, the person asking drives a niche vehicle, like a 1949 Nash* or something equally obscure. While it’s a cool ride, I suspect the owner has a tough time finding all kinds of parts for his car, let alone an oil filter. One of the occupational hazards of driving a rare or classic vehicle is finding parts, including an oil filter.
The good news is, our line of Ea Oil Filters covers 92.5 percent of North American passenger cars and light trucks on the road today. That’s pretty good coverage, if you ask me. And we recently introduced seven new filters.
But what about the remaining 6.5 percent? Why can’t we simply introduce a few filters to cover those vehicles, too?
To do that, we’d need to add more than 130 filters to our lineup. That’s not as easy as it sounds for a few reasons.
One, only a select few filter manufacturers in the world are capable of making our filters. We partner with specific manufacturers who build our filters according to our exacting specifications. Since we use only high-performance media, not all manufacturers maintain production lines capable of making our filters. That means they’d have to add special tooling that can be expensive.
Another reason is potential sales volume. Adding new production lines and retooling a plant makes sense when sales justify the capital investment, but that’s simply not the case in this situation.
Most of the vehicles for which we don’t offer an Ea Oil Filter are pre-1990s vehicles or specialty European cars. As you can imagine, the potential sales volume for those filters doesn’t justify their introduction.
For example, here are some of the vehicles for which we don’t offer an Ea Oil Filter and the numbers currently registered in North America:
- 1985-87 Ford* Ranger and Bronco II (336)
- 1969-77 Jaguar* XJ6 (684)
- Up to 1965 Austin Healy* (2)
In some cases, we don’t cover newer vehicles. The 2014-15 Chevrolet* Cruze* diesel is one example. Chevy only built 12,173 diesel Cruzes, and we’d have to sell a filter to almost everyone to make it worthwhile to introduce one for that vehicle.
Not only that, but in the case of many new vehicles, the engine design can change from one model year to the next, meaning the filter size changes, too. The 2016-17 Chevy Cruze diesel, for example, takes a different filter
than the 2014-15 model year. And Chevy only built about 7,000 Cruzes in 2016 and 2017. Again, the potential sales volume simply doesn’t add up to make business sense.
You might ask, when do we introduce new Ea Oil Filters? Well, we review our filter line annually to ensure the optimum lineup for maximum vehicle coverage. We add filters based on several criteria. For example, if we
receive several filter requests for a specific vehicle. We ask ourselves if that vehicle fits our core market.
Is it for a car or truck, or is it for a log splitter or pressure washer? The answer helps determine the likelihood we introduce a new filter one day.
We also look at sales of our WIX and MANN oil filters for those applications. We partner with WIX and MANN to cover the 6.5 percent of the North American vehicle market for which we don’t offer an Ea Oil Filter. WIX and MANN filters offer excellent performance.
If the sales numbers for those filters for a particular application are strong, then we’ll look into introducing an Ea Oil Filter. If the sales are low and declining, there simply isn’t a good reason to act.
I love cool old cars as much as the next guy but creating an oil filter for them isn’t as simple as it might seem. Fortunately, we still cover the vast majority of the market.
To learn which AMSOIL Filters & Lubricants are recommended for your vehicle / equipment, use This Lookup to find recommendations.
The above article taken from the Spring 2019 edition of the AMSOIL PC Magazine.