ILMA Compoundings October 2016 - 42

FOCUS ON ETHICS

Why Can't All ATFs Just
Get Along?
Luc Girard

I

f you're on a quiet highway late at night (think I-40 between
Oklahoma City and Amarillo), and a dashboard indicator
lights up to tell you to check a fluid under the hood ...
you're going to cross your fingers that you make it to an open
establishment, and if you manage that, you'll probably take
whatever assistance they give you that gets you on your way.
But for most North Americans, living in or near agglomerations,
it's rare to have to make auto lubricant compromises dictated
by absolute unavailability. The urban dweller whose car calls
for 5W-20 is unlikely to be forced to use a 10W-40. Responsible
retailers, distributors and installers can be counted on to
provide the "right stuff," at the right performance category, and
it's rarely more than a few miles away, save for the 1 percent of
the population living in "Frontier Counties."
Why, then, has our industry become ambivalent about
providing the "right stuff" when it comes to automatic
transmission fluids (ATF)?
Before I get fully into that, I will declare something of a bias - in
2005, after a few years supporting base oil sales, I was assigned
to a new job of supporting factory-fill business for OEMs. My
first task was to be on point for the worldwide launch of a new
ATF.
I got to see firsthand how much work, time and mileage
accumulation go into designing and validating a factory-fill ATF.
Most lubricants spend their time trying to keep things sliding
past each other. ATFs need to do a lot of that, but they also
have to make sure that various frictional materials "stick"
together at the right moment and "let go" an instant
later. And because each transmission designer
seems to pick different combinations
of frictional materials, with each

combination having different "stick" vs. "let go" parameters ... I'm
personally hard-pressed to get fully behind multi-vehicle ATFs,
unless someone on the manufacturer's payroll happens to be
named Harry Potter, with "Product Compliance Magician" for a
job title.
Harry is going to be very busy, because it's not just frictional
effects you have to worry about: there are several mutually
exclusive kinematic viscosity specifications of concern. Even
if you decided to break those viscosities down into broad
"buckets," you'd need at least two: a bucket for kinematic
viscosity of about 8 cSt at 100° C, another around 6 cSt, and
there is work going on from at least one of the Big Three for 4.5
cSt.
Numerically, these differences may seem small. But if these were
engine oils (which they are NOT), they would thus be 20-grade,
16-grade1 and 8-grade, per SAE J300. We worry enough about
small kinematic viscosity changes for engine oils to treat them
as different buckets. I think the same needs to be true for ATFs.
To get a sense of how mutually exclusive the physical and
chemical behaviors of various ATFs happen to be, get a copy
of SAE paper 2007-01-3987. Space prevents me from discussing
its contents, but it's a worthwhile read to grasp OEM misgivings
around multivehicle ATFs.
I keep hearing "There are too many ATFs to stock" and "If I
don't sell a multivehicle ATF, the guy down the street will." If you
choose to go with those arguments, remember that there is
legislative pressure coming down on this market. ILMA is trying
to ease that pressure by trying to nail down the documentation
required to demonstrate compliance, but it's unlikely that
the pressure is going to go away altogether.

Vol. 66 No. 10 * 42 * October 2016 Compoundings
ILMA Compoundings October 2016

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