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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Fuck Cars
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That is wear and tear on your engine, and the meager benefits you get from that are far offset by the maintenance costs.
For example, my not so fuel friendly car has, over the course of 3 years, shut itself off at stop lights for over an hour and a half.
Through doing this an entire gallon of fuel has been saved.
Over 3 years.
It's engine down time is usually less than 10 seconds.
I get that it feels like this is a benefit if you have all of the cars everywhere doing it, but this ain't it. Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Service trucks will put many, many more miles on them in that 3 years than I will. Their idle time might be a great deal more if they're leaving it to idle while they go try to make a delivery. But, two things: those systems are ridiculously easy to turn off, by design, and diesel engines really don't like working that way. The wear and tear would be worse, more expensive, and more harmful.
I'm not saying throw your hands up and give up. I an saying that the service vehicles are the ones we actually should be making exceptions for. Even in a consumer car free society, we'll still need the service vehicles to do work.
You save 2 to 3 % on average and up to 7 % in pure city traffic.
Where are you that red lights are less than 10 seconds? Not many cars are going to get through a green light of below 10 seconds.
That just isn't supported by real world data. Manufacturers may claim that but they make a lot of claims that only apply to factory testing conditions.
Real world testing comes to the same conversion. 10 % saving in pure city traffic can be expected.
Only stopping for 1.5 hours on red lights over 3 years makes you an super extreme outlier. Now you don't specify the total distance in those 3 years, so perhaps you just don't drive at all, but realistically people drive something like 10'000 km per year, average speed around 50 km/h, time spent driving about 30'000 km / 50 km/h = 600 h. To only get to 1.5 hours at red lights would mean 10 seconds per hour of driving. I hope that makes it clear how unrealistic YOUR number is.
If every car in the US had auto stop and drove similar to yours, it would have stopped 190,000,000 pounds of CO2 from going into the atmosphere in those 3 years.
Extra batteries aren't required for Auto-stop. If battery wear was significantly faster due to the feature it wouldnt matter, batteries are much more recyclable than burnt gas.
I had auto-stop on my last car, and the battery made it 9 years before I finally had to replace it, and when the feature wasn't working (too cold out) it made a noticeable impact on my fuel economy, around 3-5 mpg.
one gallon over 60,000 miles. My guy, that just isn't the answer.
You're also assuming that it's only working at traffic lights. My auto stop would activate when the car was slowing down under 10mph. It also activates in car washes and when the car is parked.
But hey, fine, if saving 190 million pound of CO2 from entering the atmosphere buy turning off idling engines isn't the answer, what would you do to save that much CO2 from running ICE vehicles instead?