The oil at operating temperature is far above boiling, chances are those three droplets are vapourized and floating around the atmosphere... with jay's farts.

 

Learn to love it

 

Under 'normal operating conditions' the oil should be at or slightly cooler than the coolant temp- if the coolant is doing it's job.

With my 78 VW Scirocco-1.5L (actually 1457 cc... and with factory oil temp gauge) the oil rarely exceeded 90-95C, unless I was hot on the throttle.

 

Still doesn't mean that the water won't evaporate. It was 40F outside today and snow melted and evaporated leaving dry ground.

 

Our trucks are certainly not performance machines, but they would probably give the Prius a run for its money. I have driven a few and they are slow, slow, slow.

 

My oil is almost always hotter than my coolant. If it wasn't suppost to be that way why would they use coolant to cool the oil? They would have to come up with a different name for the oil cooler (coolant cooler or oil heater).

 

lol, my 88 with 300,000 miles (before the HG blew) and a bad tranny/clutch SMOKED a prius. my truck made the prius look like a turtle. sad, really.

 

two reasons:
1) if the coolant is warmer than the oil, the coolant accelerates warming the oil up to normal temp.
2) if the oil is warmer than the coolant, the coolant cools the oil.
...mostly the same reasons the ATF cooler runs through the radiator (at the bottom of the radiator, before the coolant goes to the engine)- the coolant will warm up faster than the ATF and warm the ATF, and will absorb heat from the ATF to mitigate temperature variations.

 

Well I have an oil temp gauge and a coolant temp gauge and probably 95% of the time the oil is hotter than the coolant.

 

I shouldn't be trying to argue much here I suppose, considering my reference is my 78 VW... (though my 81 was the same)... The oil temp on either of them rarely (as I mentioned) went higher than the water temp. If I drove them hard, the oil temp quickly rose higher than the water temps but even then didn't exceed around 240F- and that was without an oil cooler. Oil temps in both VW's on surface streets just cruising was about the same or just a bit cooler than the coolant temp. Maybe that's why I pulled almost 300k miles out of the 81 (using 20w50 oil) before I totalled it*?

*edit- when I tried to change the radio station and the Pontiac Bonneville station wagon stopped in front of me.

 

Yeah my oil stays around 220-240* F (Mobil 1 5w30).

So to the OP, water boils at 212* F (@ sea level) so a little water in the oil will be boiled off when you get the oil up to temp.