I hope this isn't as daft a question as it sounds!

On my petrol cars the fresh oil looks a nice, clean golden colour even after a few thousand miles. On my last Diesel (a Skoda) it looked dirty almost immediatley after the oil change - this was due to that engine retaining a litre of oil when drained, whatever method was used.

So on the Ford diesel (Ecoblue 1.6), what should I expect?

Thanks - Richard.

Looks dirty/black on my 2.2 diesel Mondeo, though not as bad as the old oil at first. This is my first diesel car and I've owned it 9 years.

My daughter has a Kuga 2.0 diesel which I ended up changing the oil twice in only 6 weeks because I wasn't happy with how black it looked after the first time. After the second change it looked more like what you expect clean oil should look like. In general I think diesel engines do turn the oil black very quickly.

Diesel oil will go black in minutes . 

I change my own oil so I know it’s been done even though the new oil looks black straight away.  Fiesta diesel.  I think on that engine it doesn’t help that the position of the drain plug means not all the old stuff runs out

53 minutes ago, isetta said:

I change my own oil so I know it’s been done even though the new oil looks black straight away.  Fiesta diesel.  I think on that engine it doesn’t help that the position of the drain plug means not all the old stuff runs out

Can you tilt the car somehpw to achieve this?

The problem is the sump plug is in the centre of the sump And in a sort of recess so inside the sump the outlet hole is higher than the floor of the sump. I don’t know why they couldn’t put it on a corner going in horizontal. 

The 2nd pic on eBay item number 143917790520 shows what I mean. It seems such a silly desigb

10 hours ago, isetta said:

The problem is the sump plug is in the centre of the sump And in a sort of recess so inside the sump the outlet hole is higher than the floor of the sump. I don’t know why they couldn’t put it on a corner going in horizontal. 

The only way I can think of around this then is to pump the oil, hot, out of the dipstick hole making sure the pip goes right to the bottom of the sump. This is the recommended method for my previous car (the Skoda diesel) and it extracted the expected amount of oil, however when I tried it on my MX5 it left some in so it was back to the sump plug! My service invoice shows an oil drain plug so they clearly use the "traditional" method of draining!. No idea what my sump looks like, I'll find that out when the warranty is up and I start to do my own work.

Thanks for all the replies, its much appreciated thanks.

So, for an update - my car has done just 18k miles, I had the oil changed on purchase at 9500 miles but didn't make a note of how the oil looked.

At 18k miles the new oil  (7 miles after the service!), can't easily be seen along the smooth edge of the dipstick but does show up on the ridges very slightly darker but not perfectly clear.

Thanks again all - Richard

It will be black as can be if left in during service interval recommendation.

Ours is black at 6 months intervals.

The only time I've seen clear oil in a diesel is when I worked at a big Utility company and when they had the truck in on every 6 weekly inspection the oil was changed and tbh it was very hard to see on the dipstick.

 😲

3 hours ago, Turvey said:

 😲

OMG! At least it's not a 1.0 Ecoboost!😀