So your car comes up to a moose nursing a calf in the middle of a road in Mammoth, Wyoming...would you want your engine to stop? Surrounded by a swarm of citified moose?  Would you?  These moose aren't scared, and frankly, you shouldn't be either.

But, that's the first time I ever witnessed the start/stop feature available in many vehicle models today.

That was during my and Brenda's Yellowstone Getaway back in September 2020.  I break that down here.  It seems that the overflow of tourists broke major records in Yellowstone in September, October, and surely November.  So among all the tourists and moose, you want your car to be turning off when you stop...only to turn back on only when it's time to go?

I had forgotten about it until Brenda recently mentioned witnessing it again with another car. It stopped when braked to a stop. Started when engaged to move forward. Stopped when braked to a stop.

When she brought that back up to me- I thought...well, let's look for experienced auto start/stop drivers that are reading this and ask what you think about the feature.

Is there a reasonable explanation?

You can get the dry Wikipedia angle here just to prove it exists. Because Wikipedia is mostly right agreed?

vehicle start-stop system or stop-start system automatically shuts down and restarts the internal combustion engine to reduce the amount of time the engine spends idling, thereby reducing fuel consumption and emissions. This is most advantageous for vehicles which spend significant amounts of time waiting at traffic lights or frequently come to a stop in traffic jams.

 

If you read the Wikipedia article- it started in 1974 with a VW,

But this ain't history, I'm just curious why sane people would want an auto-start/stop system that could leave your engine dead on the road behind a nursing moose. Well?

Stop-start systems, be they on a petrol or diesel vehicle, are, generally speaking, so smooth you’ll barely notice when the thing’s shutdown and, by the time your foot has come off the brake pedal the car has started again and you’re off and running. Some systems even respond to a jink of the steering wheel. Or there are those that are clever enough to determine when you’ve slowed down almost to a complete stop but have changed your mind and jumped back onto the throttle again… even though the system has started its stop cycle, it’s able to cancel that in a split second based on your throttle application and keep you moving

Sounds like anti-lock brakes, except it turns your car off. There are a few articles here, here, and here.  I'd sure be interested to know why I should be interested.

Do you tolerate start/stop on your vehicle? Tell us all in the comments.


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