[masraum]

Originally Posted by Dixie

The start/stop feature induces more stress in me than I care to admit. If I'm in a car that has it, I have to turn it off. If I don't I'm sitting at a red light thinking, isn't all this starting bad for the bearings? This can't be good for the starter. Will I be stuck here if the system just now happened to fail? Am I really saving all that much gas?

I don't think it's marketed as "we're going to save you $1000 a year in gas."

But, if it saves 10 gallons of gas per vehicle per year (which doesn't seem that crazy for folks in big cities that commute in stop and go traffic), then multiply that savings by how many thousands of cars just in the US, and you potentially have HUGE reduction in use of gas over the course of a year. I think the "engineering explained" guy did some math on the potentially yearly savings and it was considerable.

I'm not out there hugging trees, and I drive a boxster S which gets crap mileage compared to a lot of cars (probably far less than the average corvette), but saving hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas sounds like a good thing.

(Any time I've had a rental or loaner with the feature, I'd figured out how to disable it or defeat it.)

Originally Posted by daepp

And don't get me started on the thinner oils they're all using. Once again, it's due to CAFE standards, the thought being that thicker oil produced a great deal of drag on reciprocating parts. Of course, they DO NEED LUBRICATING!

I have heard that while yes, it may improve mileage, it's also due to modern vehicles having much tighter clearances, and tighter clearances call for reduced viscosity. I think Lake Speed has said something about it, but I don't remember exactly what.