Very soothing to be sitting at a stop light in complete silence and smoothness with the engine off and not using any gas. Have you actually driven one for an extended period besides a test drive? I enjoy every car thus equipped. One or two fewer cars (and maybe more) can make it through the traffic light with every light cycle due to this delay. Dangit! You find yourself waiting for the engine to restart. You need to beat the adjacent car away from the light to make the lane change. With almost all of my driving being highway, the minor fuel efficiency of this feature does not apply to me.Īs a driver you get in the wrong lane at a light for an upcoming turn. And maybe because I am just an old sour-puss that despises new technology unless it solves a problem for me. The 2017 F150 sport with the v6 ecoboost we have at work has a button to disable it right next to the blinkers.īecause the feature is annoying, time wasting, causes excessive wear of the starter motor, and may shorten the battery life. I read that Ford trucks can be fooled by inserting a "Trailer Wiring Tester" into the trailer light connector, or into a new connector hidden out of sight, and the system is just as easily defeated and resettable for later sale. Open one wiring harness connection adjacent to the hood latch, insert the small plastic bodied device between the connector halves, and no more Stop-Start feature - until you decide to just as easily remove the small component. This device is effectively a switch and timer that fools the car into thinking the hood is open at each start, then automatically sends the "hood latched" signal to the computer a second or so later. They did this to prevent surprise engine starts when Service Dept Techs are working under the hood. Obviously, a starter that was designed for 50,000 start cycles can't suddenly be responsible for 500K start cycles, so automakers have phased in special starters to better handle the stress.I did some internet sleuthing and discovered the device you identified in your reply.Īpparently GM included a bit of safety logic in their Stop-Start feature which disables the feature when the hood is raised. The electric starter that was designed to fire your engine a few times a day now has to start the same engine every time the car comes to a full stop. ![]() More important to the automakers, adding stop/start tech increases Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) figures, helping offset all those big SUVs being sold.Īutomatic stop/start systems do present engineering challenges. If you do a lot of stop-and-go driving, you're reducing emissions and saving fuel by not idling for extended periods. But what's really going on?Īs the name implies, automatic stop/start shuts off the engine instead of it idling at a stop and then rapidly restarts the engine when you want to drive away. The concept is simple enough - if you're stopped at a red light or train crossing, you don't need the engine if the engine isn't running, you're not wasting any energy. If you've shopped for a new car in the past few years, you've probably seen automakers touting new stop/start systems that can help save a little gas money.
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