Cold Weather and Engines
With the onset of seriously cold winter temperatures in the Northeast, please remember to warm your engine before speeding away in your exotic, sports or any car in cold weather.
As tempting as it is to jump in and mash the gas pedal down, accelerating hard before the engine has a chance to warm the engine oil is harmful to your engine.
Engine Idling vs Restarting
While on the subject of cold weather driving, found this article on idling, which refutes the myth that idling a car is more environmentally friendly than restarting the engine. Drive the car to warm it, don’t idle. Sharing an excerpt from ‘the Daily Green’:
1. Driving Warms the Car Faster than Idling.
If your concern is not the health of the car, but simply your own creature comforts, Bob Aldrich of the California Energy Commission points out that “idling is not actually an effective way to warm up a car — it warms up faster if you just drive it.”
2. Ten Seconds Is All You Need.
Environmental Defense Fund, which produced the Idling Gets You Nowhere campaign, advises motorists to turn off their ignition if they’re sitting stopped for more than 10 seconds. “After about ten seconds, you waste more money running the engine than restarting it”.
3. Idling Hurts the Car.
According to the Hinkle Charitable Foundation’s Anti-Idling Primer, idling forces an engine “to operate in a very inefficient and gasoline-rich mode that, over time, can degrade the engine’s performance and reduce mileage.”
4. Idling Costs Money.
Over a year of five minutes of daily idling (which causes incomplete combustion of fuel), the “Anti-Idling Primer” estimates that the operator of a V-8-engined car will waste 20 gallons of gasoline, which not only produces 440 pounds of carbon dioxide but costs at least $60.
