There’s nothing that bugs the anti-petroleum Left more than seeing hundreds of non-moving cars with their engines running. They call it a waste of gasoline.
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Of course, it’s not actually a waste of gasoline at all; it’s just part of driving. We need cars to stop at red lights; that’s what red lights are for, so that traffic is managed safely. Cars stop for a moment at a stop sign, a little longer at a red light, sometimes going back and forth from stop to start on a highway or other major road during rush hour, or when sitting in the intersection awaiting a right or left turn.
You can’t look at each segment of a road trip separately; the issue is driving from point A to point B, not studying each individual step along the way. Stopping at stop signs and red lights is just part of the process of safe driving; it allows a huge number of cars to share the road network in all directions with a minimum of accidents.
But somewhere along the way, the Left came up with the idea of an automatic stop-start mechanism (also known as micro hybrid, idling stop, or other names). It’s an automatic way for the car to shut down its engine whenever it detects that the vehicle has come to a stop, without the driver switching it off.
I’m sure this idea sounds wonderful to the Leftists who dreamed it up; you are no longer burning up gasoline for the 10 seconds at the stop sign, or the 30 to 120 seconds at the red light, or the 15 or 30 seconds while waiting to turn left, or the minute while waiting for a police car, ambulance, or funeral procession to pass by, and so forth.
It sounds to the Left like a fabulous savings of gasoline. This must be wonderful for the environment, right?
That’s as far as the Left goes with it. They don’t dig any deeper. So the EPA started offering a tax credit to auto manufacturers who would add this tool, and before you knew it, 18 separate manufacturers were taking advantage of this tax credit, installing stop-start mechanisms in cars and SUVs and minivans. It’s almost unavoidable now.
The Trump administration is removing this foolhardy tax credit this year, in hopes that automakers will stop installing this alleged “feature” as soon as possible.
Why?
Not because the Right doesn’t like conserving gasoline. We pay the same price at the pump that the Left does; everyone wants to save money.
But because the Right dug deeper into the issue, and recognized that this allegedly environmental improvement was actually a net cost — to the driver, to the economy, maybe even to the cause of safety.
Is there a tiny savings in fuel consumption alone? Perhaps. It takes fuel to stop and start, and it takes fuel to idle. How long you idle will affect the net result in actual mpg.
The feature adds several hundred dollars to the cost of the vehicle — there’s the control apparatus itself, the auxiliary battery that operates it, the additional buttons on the dashboard, wiring to support it, etc. That’s several hundred additional dollars when you buy the car, and if you finance the vehicle with an auto loan, you can double that.
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The feature adds some weight to the vehicle. Not a lot of weight, but batteries and controls do have weight, and they take up precious space in the engine and cabin; adding weight reduces the fuel efficiency in operation a bit. So even if it saves a bit of fuel when turning the car off, it wastes a bit all the rest of the time the car is running.
Every time the stop-start function breaks down, that’s another additional repair. One more thing to go wrong. An additional unexpected cost to the owner. This otherwise-unneeded second battery needs to be replaced every hundred thousand miles or so, sometimes more often. That’s an unexpected expense of a few hundred dollars that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Every time the start-stop mechanism kicks in, it creates a delay in the driver being able to take off when ready. This means that every car with this “feature” takes a few seconds longer to get moving when the red turns to green, or when the fire truck passes by, or the row of geese or ducks finishes crossing the street and you can get going again. This delay, while brief, means that sometimes, the fourth or fifth or sixth car at the light doesn’t make it, and has to sit through yet another light. All over the country, every day, there are cars that would have made it through their lights but didn’t because cars ahead of them had this “feature.” This causes more people to have a slower commute, and ironically, it means that more other people’s cars will be idling longer than they would have otherwise.
Finally, as one would expect, the gizmo causes a significant increase in long-term wear-and-tear on the vehicle. Every time it kicks in, it unnecessarily taxes the starter, the alternator, the main battery, and other parts a little bit more, speeding up the general aging of the vehicle. And for what?
How many cars have suffered from this foolishness, and how much has this cost our economy? Well, at present, about 62% of new cars have the feature, which is estimated to add an average of about $400 to each new vehicle’s price.
Conservatively, then, with about 15.5 million new vehicles sold per year in the USA, we’re talking about somewhere around $4 billion per year in added costs of new vehicles sold, before counting loan interest, increased repairs, etc.
That’s quite an unnecessary hit to a nation with an affordability crisis. Especially if it doesn’t help, but rather, just keeps stacking up additional costs with no real net benefit at all.
The more we study the policies of the “green” extremists, the more we see this issue play out: higher costs to both manufacturers and consumers, increased waste all around, and for no real net benefit anyway.
Kudos to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for having the courage to kill the government’s endorsement of this stupid program.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade compliance trainer, public speaker, and consultant at The Trade Compliance Coach. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, and his brand new book about the lives and times of our Founding Fathers, The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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