How does everyone feel about the auto start stop?

[Mitchell]

Auto start/stop is a feel good climate change gimmick to make some lefty loonie feel good about themselves saving the planet, but really serves no practical purpose. and just pisses people off.

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[NiCkyGee]

Me no likey.
It's not as noticeable as in other vehicles, but for my driving I'm not sitting long enough for it to make a difference in MPG.
Someone does sell a gizmo that disables it for $100 but I'm just getting in the habit of turning it off when I get in.
I just don't like the idea of extra wear on the starter & battery. I work from home so my vehicle may sit for days just to make a 5 minute trip to the store, so I have a Battery Tender I'll throw on my older vehicles to keep the juice up.
Sport Mode will also disable it.
I think the gizmo is called Autostop Eliminator.

Didn't know about the Sport mode disable!

 

[sapperforward]

I've always wondered does it save that much gas in regular driving conditions like just normal stop light in a smaller town? I'm sure it helps in heavy city traffic obviously. I also wonder if all the constant restarting bad for the battery, starter, spark plugs etc? I feel like when I get my truck I'll probably turn it off most days. Do you guys use the auto start stop or do you turn yours off?

It's one of the first things I disabled

 

[James K]

Instead of purchasing a Start-stop Eliminator, I recommend investing into Forscan and making the easy change to get rid of it. And then you have Forscan to make any other changes you would like.

Start stop eliminator simply holds your preference and makes no changes to factory settings while Forscan changes factory settings. I'm not an engineer but would much rather defend option one in court should it be challenged, say on a warranty claim. But if all things were equal (out of warranty), I'd agree with you.

 

[OneAlienBoi]

Very annoying in the ICE vehicles I've ridden in that have it, especially when the whole vehicle shakes when the engine re-starts.

Lack of that "feature" is another reason I love Hybrid vehicles.

The worse was a rental Pacifica. I've driven countless rental Pacificas now. The shudder from the auto start/stop is horrific in those.

 

[SLJ]

I always turn it off. Pressing a button is no big deal.
I will say that if you do a lot of start/stop it's a battery killer, especially in the Winter. I'd never use it in the Winter.

 

[Glen Baker LLC]

The only experience I have with stop/start, was when I rented a Maverick EcoBoost for 48 hours from U-Haul. Priority number one. I wanted to check out how easy it was to get in and out of, the ride, usefulness of the bed. I usually turned the stop/start off. It was less time consuming than hitting the mode button five times to get into eco mode.

 

[PNWMaverick]

On my hybrid? It's fantastic!

On my brother's Ecoboost? It is horrible and having to turn it off every start is annoying.

 

[GA Hot Pepper]

I've always wondered does it save that much gas in regular driving conditions like just normal stop light in a smaller town? I'm sure it helps in heavy city traffic obviously. I also wonder if all the constant restarting bad for the battery, starter, spark plugs etc? I feel like when I get my truck I'll probably turn it off most days. Do you guys use the auto start stop or do you turn yours off?

Auto Start/Stop was not developed for fuel savings. It was designed for lower emission. It was mandated in Europe to cut down on emissions in large cities, like Rome, Paris, London, and others. Can you imagine 60 vehicles stopped at a large intersection, the amount of pollution created. Ford puts a beefed up starter, and AGM battery. So don’t worry about the small stuff. Hybrids have been doing this for 20+ years.

 

[PNWMaverick]

Auto start/stop is a feel good climate change gimmick to make some lefty loonie feel good about themselves saving the planet, but really serves no practical purpose. and just pisses people off.

Except it has a measurable impact on fuel economy.

But I guess saving money is one of those "lefty loonie" things. That and those darned emission laws that allow us to still be able to breath when we go outside in a major city.

How dare THEY take away my rights to breath 1981 L.A. smog!!! Those loons! Muh RIGHTS!!!

 

[G5892]

Doesn’t bother me. I’ll take any savings in gas that I can

 

[Skyline]

I'm sure it helps in heavy city traffic obviously.

If you drive in an urban area with a mild climate, it will save gas.

It may help in metropolitan cities, but not much in medium size cities, around 120K people and lots of traffic light. Unless, you selectively enable/disable the idle stop. Since I drive mainly in the city, by now I know when to enable or disable it. It's not good to pull up to the light, idling stops and five seconds later go. Yes, it saves gas, but wears the starter and drains the battery. It wasn't used to be an issues with the Maverick, most of the times the system disabled it anyway. With the Ridgeline, it works better, but I learned to disable/enable it depending what part of the town I am driving. But, yeah, it saves gas...

 

[Drask-CA]

I always disable it 1st thing after starting the engine ... no Big deal for me!

 

[Maverick2023]

you can’t control it with hybrid so I just leave it on.

 

[WNYEscapee]

It's been an automatic reaction of mine to start the vehicle, reach down and disable start/stop, then switch it into gear. If by some chance I forgot to do this, it is quickly caught at the first stop when the engine shuts off.

Do I care about how much gas this "might" save? Not one bit, I'm concerned about the constant need to restart, the loss of oil circulation as the turbo might still be spinning at a high RPM... I also do not like that other systems continue to run off of battery power while you're producing no means to maintain the battery -- yeah, yeah, there's safeguards; but how often have we seen issues with software which has created problems.

In a perfect world there'd be none of this stuff and we'd do away with all the additional complexity of these systems, electric water pumps, hoses, relays, software...

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