The Castrol Nexcel promises an 90-second oil change, which is around 13 times faster than it currently takes to change the oil in your car, and there are emissions benefits too.

THIS WEEK, the Castrol Nexcel was launched promising to slash the time it takes to perform an oil change down to just 90 seconds. It’s being hailed as the “most significant oil change innovation in automotive history”.

According to Castrol, its Nexcel system has been tested on a range of engines from small city cars to high-powered racing engines. “It functioned smoothly even under severe braking of up to 1.8G, the equivalent of a vehicle travelling at 100km/h stopping dead in 1.6 seconds. Additionally, the system oil flow has been tested up to 600 litres a minute –10 to 20 times greater than seen in a conventional passenger car engine”. Impressive.

The Nexcel isn’t available yet to be retrofitted to your car, sadly, although in the video below it certainly seems to have been retrofitted to a Toyota 86 and others. Castrol expects it to be available on a range of new cars within the next five years and is currently in discussions with  “several manufacturers”.

Right now, only the Aston Martin track-only Vulcan will be available with Nexcel as standard.

Aston Martin CEO Dr Andy Palmer said: “We believe that the Aston Martin Vulcan sets a whole new standard in the ultra-high luxury supercar class, just as the Nexcel technology sets a whole new standard in engine lubrication. It therefore made perfect sense for us to bring these two innovations in engineering together, and showcase their capabilities.”

The three key selling points highlighted by Castrol, include:

• Castrol has demonstrated that Nexcel delivers a reduction in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions on modern engines. Moreover the technology paves the way for a new generation of precision-engineered engine oils delivering further engine performance & CO₂ benefits.
• Nexcel makes the oil change super quick and clean for workshops, allowing them to offer more flexible and convenient service options to customers.
• Oil cells are collected after use, avoiding wastage of used oil. This oil can then be re-refined back into high quality lubricants. If Nexcel were fitted onto every car in the world today, it would save more than 200,000 road tankers of virgin oil from being produced, every year.

Paul Waterman, Castrol CEO, said: “We believe this is the biggest leap forward in oil change technology in the history of the combustion engine. Castrol’s engineers are leaders in their field and have come up with a really innovative piece of technology. It’s the result of almost three years’ work but as soon as people see the benefits in emissions and servicing as well as the substantial environmental benefits, they will ask why it hasn’t been done before.”

That all sounds great, but how does the system actually work? Good question, so we’ve asked Castrol and they’ve let us know they’ll have an answer back in the next 24 hours. Stay tuned.