Comment 5630

By Number33 (anonymous) | Posted February 24, 2007 at 18:46:10

Honestly, what I think should be done on ALL CARS from now on is to use an alternator/starter that is a larger motor than a standard starter that could start the endine up automatically when stopped for longer than a few seconds at a time. I see lots of poeple who leave their cars idling for like 15 minutes, with their keys in the ignition [i]unattended[/i] so they can go into stores to buy things, wasting gas and practically begging for their car to be stolen (It's nonsense like this why car insurance is so expensive...)

If the issue is that they want their car to be warm as soon as they walk in, one way that this has been done on a few high-end cars is to keep an insulated bottle of hot wax in the car connected to the coolant line -- this will stay hot even if the car has been off for a day or two, meaning first thing you start up in a daily-driver car, you have hot air blowing out of your vents, and your engine won't pollute as much and won't get as much wear and tear as it doesn't need as long to "warm up".

For things like cabin heating, they can cycle the engine off and on periodically to keep the engine coolant temp up if it drops too low, and to generate battery power for electric seat heaters etc, without constant idling (throws most the heat out the tailpipe anyway).

I bet these few changes could be implemented on a wide scale for a couple hundred bucks a car.

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