To say I despise this as the worst "feature" ever foisted upon drivers is an understatement.
It is even worse: The repeated cycles kill the batteries, then...when your battery approaches death one day and will be unable to restart the engine, your "feature" STOPS your engine for you in the middle of several lanes of traffic at the busiest rush hour time and location, then...your engine will not start.
Thinking your car may have stalled, you put your car into PARK, and attempt to restart, but...since your battery is dead, it will not even start. Worse yet, you have just shot yourself in the foot, because now you have put it into PARK, and if the engine cannot start, you cannot shift it into neutral and even push your car to the side of the road to allow others to pass. This happened to me as described below, if you are interested in reading it.
I have a Subaru Forester, and love the way it feels and drives, but it has all that crap, especially the thing that shuts off the engine when you stop at a light.
Makes me grit my teeth.
Anyway, last summer, I stopped at a red light during rush hour at an extremely busy intersection. When the light changed, I pressed on the accelerator, but...nothing happened. Puzzled, I put the car into park, tried to restart the engine...nothing. And this is a crazy intersection, so...I got out, waved all the cars around me, put up the hood and put my flashers on.
Then, when all the traffic drained, I figured I would push the thing off the side of the road...but...couldn't get it out of park! Then, cars came up behind me, and when the light changed...they all just sat there. I had to point at them, point at my raised hood, and wave them around. I know people are on autopilot going into work sometimes, but I thought "What the hell is the matter with these people?"
I tried using AAA, and they made me use the app on my smartphone to put the request for assistance in, so...I dutifully put the request in through the AAA application, and...everything looked good. So, as I am waiting for a tow, I am standing off to the side. Again, this is a three lane road. Two lanes approaching the light, one lane going the other direction. I was in the middle lane to take a left.
I was not right at the light, I would have been the equivalent of two cars spaces back from the light in the center lane, with a full, clear lane going in the same direction I would have been going, but everyone takes a left, so people kept coming up behind me and just sitting there! So...I kept waving them around. v Finally, a town cop comes over and parks behind me. He asks me if I called for a tow yet, and I explain to him what is going on, and that I am waiting for AAA to send a truck. So he begins directing traffic, waving these people around my car where they have a free and open lane, and I can tell by his body language and facial expression that he is getting frustrated, because HE is behind my car with his lights on, and people are STILL stopping and waiting there.
The cop finally turns to me and says "What the hell is the matter with these people?"...exactly what I had been muttering to myself earlier!
So, the cop asks me when I think AAA is going to arrive, so I go in the app on my phone to see the status, and it says something like "Your request has been cancelled. Please reenter your request." So I said "Screw this." and began casting about for a phone number to call, and finally found one and when I called, got into the hold queue with the "There is a high volume of calls at this time. You are very important to us. Please hold..." and of course the damned stupid music.
I tell the cop they have me on hold, and now it has been almost 45 minutes and the cop says "Let me call a truck. If I call them, they will be here immediately. I can do that right now, but they take cash only. There is an ATM over there." So I said okay.
I had been there now nearly an hour, and the cop about 45 minutes or so, and the whole time, we got to talk as, standing next to me and irritatedly waving cars around his cruiser, we chatted. I really liked him. A middle aged bald guy like myself (Now I am not middle aged, I am a senior citizen!) I asked him what he liked best about his job, and he said "Things like this! Not stressful. Get to talk to people!" He said he had been on the force for 28 years. I actually enjoyed being there and chatting too, even though work was crazy for me at that time.
Finally, the truck showed up, and the guy tried to jump my car. No dice. He told me the battery was dead and needed replacing. He didn't do that, so he suggested I call AAA and have them send a battery guy over. Instead of having him tow me to my house which would have cost a small fortune, I had him tow me about 200 yards away to the parking lot of the bank with the ATM, which he did.
As he unloaded my car and we talked, I mentioned I couldn't get my car out of park, and he said "Ah. You gotta do this..." and showed me a little hole in front of my shifter that had a plastic cover. He pried off the cover, and said I had to stick something down there to get it out of park. When he asked if I had a pen I handed him one, and he pried off the cover and stuck the ink cartridge in the hole.
Then it slipped out of his fingers, and he couldn't get it out! Fortunately, I am one of those Swiss Army knife guys, and I thankfully had tweezers in the knife and we were able to retrieve it because it wasn't that far down! Whew. I had visions of that ink cartridge getting enmeshed in something and needing to have the console removed!
I had to wait about another hour and a half for the AAA guy to show up. In that time, I pulled a folding chair out of my car (I always keep two there) and set up my laptop with a hot spot and went to work, even though I could see the building I worked in about a quarter of a mile away.
Finally, the AAA guy showed up and managed to get the car started by leaving the battery charger hooked up for a longer period of time. While the car was running, he began to disconnect the battery, and I interrupted him with "Hey! The car is still running!" and he said patiently (but not unkindly) "That is how we do it these days. That way, you don't lose all your car settings." Wow. Made sense to me...never thought of that.
All's well that ends well. I had to buy a new little plastic cap for that hole in the console because the tow truck guy lost that (I looked all over inside and outside the vehicle) but it wasn't expensive, a couple of bucks.
But I developed a new found hatred for all that electronic crap on the car. If the engine hadn't shut off due to that idiotic gas-saving thing, I would have gotten to work, and been none the wiser until I came out to go home. But at that point, I wouldn't be in the middle of the road at rush hour, and I wouldn't have had to shell out for a 200 yard tow that cost me $90, which I would have to submit to AAA to get reimbursed for.
So, yeah. I hate all that electronic stuff.
BTW, I know this is long (If you even get this far) but I like to write these things down to remember...:)