Home / Robert Farley / Non-Pedestrian Concerns

Non-Pedestrian Concerns

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This is an odd little explainer:

We’ve all heard the idea: In winter, your car needs a little time to warm up before you can drive it. And that’s why across the United States, people who live in cold and snowy places — and especially those whose cars have remote starters — often fire up their engines long before they start driving. Heck, they might even start the car from the kitchen in the morning, and only then start the coffee brewing.

But it turns out that this idea of idling your car during the winter is just wrong. And so are the many, many Americans who believe it — one 2009 study found that on average, Americans thought they should idle for over 5 minutes before driving when temperatures were below 32 degrees…

Idling in winter thus has no benefit to your (presumably modern) car. Auto experts today say that you should warm up the car no more than 30 seconds before you start driving in winter. “The engine will warm up faster being driven,” the EPA and DOE explain. Indeed, it is better to turn your engine off and start it again than to leave it idling.

I’ll confess; I start the car a good five minutes early, while I’m still in the process of convincing the twins to put on their damn shoes. Like every single person under the age of seventy, however, my decision to idle the car has nothing to do with prepping the carburetor. It turns out that cars, when left in a cold garage overnight, are fucking cold; starting them early makes their insides less cold. If you’re not fortunate enough to have a garage, starting them early gets you a good headstart on defrosting the windows, and I’ve been told that driving while sheets of ice still cover the windshield is both dangerous and irresponsible.

Now, I’ll grant that running the engine for five minutes to solve these two problems can be wasteful, selfish, etc.  Nevertheless, an article of this sort should probably concentrate on the reasons that people actually idle their cars, rather than presume that the problem lies in ignorance of the engineering of the modern automobile. Indeed, I’d guess that the historical interest in idling a car on a cold morning has far less to do with engine health than it does with the aforementioned two factors.

 

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