1. Driving warms the car faster than idling.
If your concern is not the health of the car, but simply your own creature comforts, Bob Aldrich of the California Energy Commission points out that “idling is not actually an effective way to warm up a car — it warms up faster if you just drive it.” Some electric cars, such as the Nissan Leaf, allow the owner to use a cellphone to tell the car (which is plugged into the grid) to pre-warm or pre-cool the interior. No idling necessary.
2. Ten seconds is all you need.
Environmental Defense Fund, which produced the Idling Gets You Nowhere campaign, advises motorists to turn off their ignition if they’re sitting stopped for more than 10 seconds. “After about ten seconds, you waste more money running the engine than restarting it, said Andy Darrell, deputy director of the EDF Energy Program. “Switch the car off at the curb and you’ll be leaving money in your wallet and protecting the air in your community.”
3. Idling hurts the car.
According to the Hinkle Charitable Foundation’s Anti-Idling Primer, idling forces an engine “to operate in a very inefficient and gasoline-rich mode that, over time, can degrade the engine’s performance and reduce mileage.”
4. Idling costs money.
Over a year of five minutes of daily idling (which causes incomplete combustion of fuel), the “Anti-Idling Primer” estimates that the operator of a V-8-engined car will waste[…]
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