The Auto/Oil Advisory Panel (AOAP), which met on June 30 in Bellevue, Wash., U.S.A., officially announced that the licensing of ILSAC GF-6 will be pushed back beyond April 1, 2018. However, AOAP also agreed that they would not issue an official target date when the new ILSAC specification for passenger car engine oils will be available for first licensing.

The push back is the result of delays in the precision matrix testing of several engine tests, including the Sequence IV-B and the Sequence V. Development of the Sequence VG-A has been discontinued. “We will try to develop another test,” according to Ford Motor Co.’s Ron Romano, “but we won’t call it a Sequence VH.”

“We are going to decide when the precision matrix and analysis are complete,” which would be not earlier than the fourth quarter of 2016, said Scott Lindholm. “We won’t make April 1st, 2018,” he said. For now, it looks like first licensing of ILSAC GF-6 could be in the fourth quarter of 2018, with the current six-month push back, but that is unofficial.

The AOAP develops the specifications against which engine oil marketers are licensed to use the API Certification Mark. The AOAP guides and facilitates the development and introduction of AOAP performance specifications for passenger car engine oil specifications in North America and Japan but the ILSAC specification is widely used in other regions as well.