Top 3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Car’s Engine Idle

Many of us have been taught by our elders that it is safe to let your car idle before you drove it. This was a common practice in 80's or early 90's when carburetor needs to be warmed up to make engine combustion process efficient. However, letting your car idle is a complete wastage of gasoline.

Modern automotive engines are designed in such a way that they don’t need idling for more than 10 seconds before driving. Moreover, car idling damages our environment severely; according to EcoWatch, a news website reports that every 10 minutes of idling cut by a person can reduce one pound of carbon dioxide. Furthermore, alternatively turning your engine start and stop does not cause battery drain or any damage to an engine. Automobile engineers claimed that turning off your engine in traffic can save your petrol. If you still want some points to prove that idling is only a waste of time, we're going to mention some important points in the following paragraphs:
 

1.Wastage of fuel:

One of the most common myth is that restart your engine consumes more fuel than idling the engine. But, idling for more than 10 sec consumes more fuel as compared to restarting the engine. According to a survey, it has been proved that the fuel consumption is directly proportional to the idling time; it increases with the size of engine and accessories load.
 

2.Global warming: 

 Letting your engine idle creates emissions of harmful gases that can damage our ozone layer and enhance global warming. There is no doubt that the level of carbon dioxide is very low during idling, but it takes a major proportion of the total harmful gases. A study reveals that carbon emission is low during idling, second lowest during start/ stop the cycle and biggest when starting a cold engine. While idling emits less carbon than start/stop or cold engine start, but still for every 0.279 cc of fuel there is 0.59g of CO2 emission, which is a major component of global warming.

3.Shortens Engine life:

When the car engine is running idle, it not only consumes the fuel but also the gaseous substances produced accumulated around the cylinder walls which decrease the oil content surrounding the walls. Idling for more than 20 minutes drops the efficiency to zero as the greater quantity of carbon gets stuck in the piston valves, face, and cylinder of the engine.
These are the reasons for which car idling is considered as harmful. If you want to keep your car engine work smoothly for years, don’t let it running idle. When you keep your engine off when it is not necessary, you can save harmful emission to the environment and can save a lot of fuel. For more information about the car maintenance, you can consult the experts of Steerzy. For more information, explore our website.