Posted on 02/12/2026 9:26:19 PM PST by Texan4Life
The Trump administration said it's ending a credit for automakers that install a so-called "start/stop feature" in the vehicles, part of a broader rollback of environmental regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The start/stop feature, which is today widely used in newer vehicles, shuts off gas engines when cars idle, such as when they're stopped at a red light or stuck in traffic. The Environmental Protection Agency described the technology as "almost universally hated" in its Thursday announcement about the broader overhaul.
About two-thirds of cars are now manufactured with the start/stop feature, which is aimed at making internal combustion engines more fuel efficient while reducing carbon emissions. One analysis found that the feature can improve fuel economy by between about 7% and 26%, depending on driving conditions.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
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https://x.com/remarks/status/2022022618459890093
I disable it by habit every time I start the engine.
Mine is almost psychic in its ability to make the wrong prediction. If I’m waiting at a car wash where I move forward one car length and then wait five minutes it won’t turn my engine off. If I stop at a stop sign just long enough to look both ways it will shut down the engine.
Anything that takes away car function from the driver is potentially dangerous in real world scenarios....now keeping the engine running while shutting down half the cylinders or running on low idle rpm with lean fuel/air mixture might be a better solution.
I hate it. Of all electronic things in cars that have been foisted on us by environmentalists and Leftists of all stripes because there is no regulation they don’t love, this worthless feature has to be, hands down, the most annoying answer stupid of all of them.
It isn’t just the amount of gas you save, which adds up to a thimble-full here or there, it is the fact that if your mind is not focused on your engine, you may forget your engine is shut off when you are preparing to pull into a busy or dangerous intersection. Then, when you see an opening, you hit the gas for an immediate takeoff, and...that vibration and rumble tells you that the window of opportunity is smaller and far more dangerous.
There is also the unexpected.
I wrote this recently...so it is long, but it is the telling of the story:
*******************************************************************
I cannot stand all the electronic crap they put in cars these days. 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 at about 6:15 one morning, just before rush hour began 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.
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...:)
It destroys your engine faster. Among the other things carmakers have done to destroy your engine faster.
How do you disable it?
If it destroyed engines, we wouldnt see hybrids from toyota with over 350k on the original motors.
Start stop functions similar to how a hybrid does while stopped.
What stop start does do is kill your starter.
I know you didn’t wrote that as humor, but man... if it didn’t suck so much, parts of that were pretty funny. You sure aren’t alone in your observations!
Best thing to do is not do anything you suggested because they already tried these things in the past at freeway speeds and engines are getting destroyed by these features. GM is famous for their engines eating cam phasers and the newer engines seem to take a shit at 100k miles due to the fuel management systems. We are talking engine replacements on these. Granted I do not know a lot on those as I do not work on a lot of newer GMs so I do not have a very good sample size beyond my shop and my neighbors.
Not on a Ford engine. Oil pressure disappears and every restart puts a little bit more metal into the oil filter if you’re lucky. Otherwise the metal bits go elsewhere and do more damage.
It’s all obnoxious to me.
I must have really dodged a bullet. A year-and-a-half ago I picked up a 2015 Explorer Sport before I had ever heard of the “feature” and luckily it doesn’t have it. I bought it because I’d become concerned that if someone hit me in my 1997 Explorer it would be immediately totalled out even though it has only 124k miles.
Yeah but other than that how did your day go? 😀
Geez....all you have to do is learn how to drive.
On my car there's a button to turn it off. Next to the reverse/neutral/drive buttons on the center console.
I'd post a picture of mine, but I don't have a photo server. It shows up in this link for me. Unfortunately, EBay won't let me hot-link the picture here. You have to click on it. It's the button at the bottom.
I read today this was one of Soetoro’s dumbass ideas. Geez. What a friggin moron.
I wouldn’t buy a car with this feature.
Climate doomers are such a drag.
Yeah, you did good. Mine’s a 2021.
Obama must have put it through in his last year in office. Whattaguy.
So every time you start the Ford the engine sheds metal? What you describe is will happen evert time you start the dumb thing.you never have oil pressure on start up because your oil pump ain’t running. Doesn’t matter if it is hot or cold.
Sounds like the answer is to not own a Ford or at least a Ford with that trash engine in it.
I say that admitting willingly most of my vehicles have been Fords and I have a 2001 e350 with the 7.3 in my driveway right now.
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