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>> You know, when you cover Car Tech for Cnet, every single day, you see innovation in every part of the car. But I can't recall any in the dipsticks, to be honest. But, that's until I got here. This is called the Intelistick [sp?], check this out. It's a probe in a metal shroud that is reading the electrical properties of motor oil, can tell if it's nice and clean and new, black and dirty, or worst of all, corrupted by coolant or fuel incursion. What it does with that data is feed it up here to a black box that collects the data and then beams it, by a Blue Tooth to any Windows powered device, a portable device, that can then pick up the data, graph it and tell you where you are with your critical lubrication. Let me show you what it reads. Okay, pay attention, class is in. Now the folks at Intelistick say this graph is typically, what oil looks like in its life. The first part here is you're starting up with all of your additives. It's really great oil and those start to wear out, burn up, get used up, whatever it may be. Down here, in this flat spot, you've got good-based oil, but all the goodies are out of it. It's perfectly drivable. And then once this starts to happen on their software, it's starting to breakdown the actual oil, not good. Now you're starting to polish parts. Leave that to the factory. Okay, let's see how that looks on an actual PDA. So, let's say I've got my Blue Tooth equipped Windows mobile PDA. Now here's the curb on an actual car readout. You can see where we started to go down there. That's where the oil is getting rid of all of its additives that make it especially protective. And now it's just base oil down there. Now the folks at Intelistick tell us you want to replace the oil somewhere along here based on how you drive. Are you a performance driver, or just a commuter? You can wait longer if you're the latter. When this starts to curve up, that means the oil's breaking down. Now you're wearing out your engine. Oh, by the way, if you had a problem with coolant or fuel getting in there, you'd see a spike and that would be a good sign to pull over and figure out what's going on. Availability of this product is going to be in December of 2007, pricing about 500 bucks msrp, and yes, you can buy it for your own car, they'll also be pushing it to fleets.
