I’ve often wondered why trucks can’t have a stop+start system integrated like many cars have these days. Wouldn’t need to be a conscious action to kill the engine, just something that happens automatically when they park up.
That is wear and tear on your engine, and the meager benefits you get from that are far offset by the maintenance costs.
For example, my not so fuel friendly car has, over the course of 3 years, shut itself off at stop lights for over an hour and a half.
Through doing this an entire gallon of fuel has been saved.
Over 3 years.
It’s engine down time is usually less than 10 seconds.
I get that it feels like this is a benefit if you have all of the cars everywhere doing it, but this ain’t it. Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Service trucks will put many, many more miles on them in that 3 years than I will. Their idle time might be a great deal more if they’re leaving it to idle while they go try to make a delivery. But, two things: those systems are ridiculously easy to turn off, by design, and diesel engines really don’t like working that way. The wear and tear would be worse, more expensive, and more harmful.
I’m not saying throw your hands up and give up. I an saying that the service vehicles are the ones we actually should be making exceptions for. Even in a consumer car free society, we’ll still need the service vehicles to do work.
Some newer diesel engines have features where they can reduce down to only running a single cylinder when parked/idling to keep the electrics running as expected to greatly reduce fuel consumption and emissions while idling which might help as that trickles into fleets
But yeah in reality these service trucks should be smaller electric vehicles for local delivery, or even better they should be electric trains pulling power directly from the grid. Heck I’ll even take diesel electric trucks with a pantograph to use power from an overhead wire instead of burning Diesel while in cities. Imagine if our roads had big networks of overhead wire to power trucks and buses from! Imagine if every hill on a highway had a section of overhead wire for trucks to power themselves off of while climbing. Realistically every transit mix will require some amount of trucks and buses so we might as well minimize their impact while we imagine a better world
If every car in the US had auto stop and drove similar to yours, it would have stopped 190,000,000 pounds of CO2 from going into the atmosphere in those 3 years.
Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Extra batteries aren’t required for Auto-stop. If battery wear was significantly faster due to the feature it wouldnt matter, batteries are much more recyclable than burnt gas.
I had auto-stop on my last car, and the battery made it 9 years before I finally had to replace it, and when the feature wasn’t working (too cold out) it made a noticeable impact on my fuel economy, around 3-5 mpg.
You’re also assuming that it’s only working at traffic lights. My auto stop would activate when the car was slowing down under 10mph. It also activates in car washes and when the car is parked.
But hey, fine, if saving 190 million pound of CO2 from entering the atmosphere buy turning off idling engines isn’t the answer, what would you do to save that much CO2 from running ICE vehicles instead?
In 60000 miles, the above poster reports one gallon of gas was saved. That’s 0.05% assuming 30mpg. We don’t need hundreds or thousands of changes that each net us tiny results, we need big changes that can happen quickly and net tens of percentage points of improvement. Yes, small changes are not literally nothing, but solutions need to look like “40% fewer cars on the road” sorts of things if we want to actually accomplish anything at all.
The world doesn’t have time or space for us to make these minor, rounding-error changes. I know the argument will be “every little bit helps” but we collectively need to start making massive changes, and stop thinking of this as an incremental problem. We should still make improvements and strive for better efficiencies, but the practical reality is that those changes are too small, too slow, and too late.
solutions need to look like “40% fewer cars on the road” sorts of things if we want to actually accomplish anything at all.
I think the worst part with this is that this can be achieved overnight be mandating remote work for office workers. We already know exactly what the impacts of remote work are because the entire white collar workforce went remote 5 years ago. Let’s do that ASAP because the only people who don’t benefit from remote work are commercial real estate investors
My imagined legislation would impose a new commute tax on businesses with office workers working in office. This tax would be proportional to the number of office workers, and would be introduced alongside a new tax incentive for remote office workers. If the office worker is permitted to work remotely 4 workdays a week the tax break effectively zeros out the commute tax cost for that worker. 3 days a week reduces the commute tax break by 3/4 for that worker, etc. Force shitty bosses to pay for their anti-worker RTO plans. The tax income would be directly applied to road and public transit infrastructure since the significantly reduced rush hour traffic would change traffic patterns and we all know how road maintenance has been struggling for funding on recent decades
Every car made in the last 10 years can use auto-start and stop without any additional hardware. It’s practically free, just a little bit of code to shut off spark and fuel under certain conditions. I’m also fairly sure the commentor just googled “how long does the average person spend waiting at stoplights every day” and used that as an estimate for the fuel savings (practically free fuel savings I might add again). Auto-Stop works at the drive-thru, it works in carwashes, it works while waiting to pick up your kids at school, it works when you run into the house to grab something you forgot. I drove a 2015 Honda CR-Z with Auto-Stop for 9 years, and when the feature wasn’t working (it disables when it is very cold out) it dropped my fuel economy about 3-5mpg, and that was for a fairly small (1.5L) motor. The savings are much greater for larger, more fuel hungry engines.
Again though, the feature does not require a new component, or special fuel, or interaction from the driver. We’re buying, burning, and wasting that extra fuel for no reason at all. No matter how small an amount it is, it’s worthwhile to save it when it costs us literally nothing to do so.
That just isn’t supported by real world data. Manufacturers may claim that but they make a lot of claims that only apply to factory testing conditions.
Only stopping for 1.5 hours on red lights over 3 years makes you an super extreme outlier. Now you don’t specify the total distance in those 3 years, so perhaps you just don’t drive at all, but realistically people drive something like 10’000 km per year, average speed around 50 km/h, time spent driving about 30’000 km / 50 km/h = 600 h. To only get to 1.5 hours at red lights would mean 10 seconds per hour of driving. I hope that makes it clear how unrealistic YOUR number is.
Yeah I’m not thinking so much stopping at lights and in traffic for this application, but something like if the parking brake is engaged and 15-30 seconds pass, then engine turns off. As the trucker in this thread noted, sometimes they’ll hop out expecting a quick stop and it balloons into 15 minutes of idle waiting on other people. Then there’s the drivers who will let the truck idle while getting loaded/unloaded just for climate controls… And thinking at scale saving even just a gallon, multiplied across a whole fleet, could be a big impact.
Of course there’s more thought to put in for secondary systems, but just strikes me as something that should be considered.
I’ve often wondered why trucks can’t have a stop+start system integrated like many cars have these days. Wouldn’t need to be a conscious action to kill the engine, just something that happens automatically when they park up.
That is wear and tear on your engine, and the meager benefits you get from that are far offset by the maintenance costs.
For example, my not so fuel friendly car has, over the course of 3 years, shut itself off at stop lights for over an hour and a half.
Through doing this an entire gallon of fuel has been saved.
Over 3 years.
It’s engine down time is usually less than 10 seconds.
I get that it feels like this is a benefit if you have all of the cars everywhere doing it, but this ain’t it. Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Service trucks will put many, many more miles on them in that 3 years than I will. Their idle time might be a great deal more if they’re leaving it to idle while they go try to make a delivery. But, two things: those systems are ridiculously easy to turn off, by design, and diesel engines really don’t like working that way. The wear and tear would be worse, more expensive, and more harmful.
I’m not saying throw your hands up and give up. I an saying that the service vehicles are the ones we actually should be making exceptions for. Even in a consumer car free society, we’ll still need the service vehicles to do work.
Some newer diesel engines have features where they can reduce down to only running a single cylinder when parked/idling to keep the electrics running as expected to greatly reduce fuel consumption and emissions while idling which might help as that trickles into fleets
But yeah in reality these service trucks should be smaller electric vehicles for local delivery, or even better they should be electric trains pulling power directly from the grid. Heck I’ll even take diesel electric trucks with a pantograph to use power from an overhead wire instead of burning Diesel while in cities. Imagine if our roads had big networks of overhead wire to power trucks and buses from! Imagine if every hill on a highway had a section of overhead wire for trucks to power themselves off of while climbing. Realistically every transit mix will require some amount of trucks and buses so we might as well minimize their impact while we imagine a better world
If every car in the US had auto stop and drove similar to yours, it would have stopped 190,000,000 pounds of CO2 from going into the atmosphere in those 3 years.
Extra batteries aren’t required for Auto-stop. If battery wear was significantly faster due to the feature it wouldnt matter, batteries are much more recyclable than burnt gas.
I had auto-stop on my last car, and the battery made it 9 years before I finally had to replace it, and when the feature wasn’t working (too cold out) it made a noticeable impact on my fuel economy, around 3-5 mpg.
one gallon over 60,000 miles. My guy, that just isn’t the answer.
You’re also assuming that it’s only working at traffic lights. My auto stop would activate when the car was slowing down under 10mph. It also activates in car washes and when the car is parked.
But hey, fine, if saving 190 million pound of CO2 from entering the atmosphere buy turning off idling engines isn’t the answer, what would you do to save that much CO2 from running ICE vehicles instead?
You’re locking in on the wrong thing.
In 60000 miles, the above poster reports one gallon of gas was saved. That’s 0.05% assuming 30mpg. We don’t need hundreds or thousands of changes that each net us tiny results, we need big changes that can happen quickly and net tens of percentage points of improvement. Yes, small changes are not literally nothing, but solutions need to look like “40% fewer cars on the road” sorts of things if we want to actually accomplish anything at all.
The world doesn’t have time or space for us to make these minor, rounding-error changes. I know the argument will be “every little bit helps” but we collectively need to start making massive changes, and stop thinking of this as an incremental problem. We should still make improvements and strive for better efficiencies, but the practical reality is that those changes are too small, too slow, and too late.
I think the worst part with this is that this can be achieved overnight be mandating remote work for office workers. We already know exactly what the impacts of remote work are because the entire white collar workforce went remote 5 years ago. Let’s do that ASAP because the only people who don’t benefit from remote work are commercial real estate investors
My imagined legislation would impose a new commute tax on businesses with office workers working in office. This tax would be proportional to the number of office workers, and would be introduced alongside a new tax incentive for remote office workers. If the office worker is permitted to work remotely 4 workdays a week the tax break effectively zeros out the commute tax cost for that worker. 3 days a week reduces the commute tax break by 3/4 for that worker, etc. Force shitty bosses to pay for their anti-worker RTO plans. The tax income would be directly applied to road and public transit infrastructure since the significantly reduced rush hour traffic would change traffic patterns and we all know how road maintenance has been struggling for funding on recent decades
You’re locking in on the wrong thing.
Every car made in the last 10 years can use auto-start and stop without any additional hardware. It’s practically free, just a little bit of code to shut off spark and fuel under certain conditions. I’m also fairly sure the commentor just googled “how long does the average person spend waiting at stoplights every day” and used that as an estimate for the fuel savings (practically free fuel savings I might add again). Auto-Stop works at the drive-thru, it works in carwashes, it works while waiting to pick up your kids at school, it works when you run into the house to grab something you forgot. I drove a 2015 Honda CR-Z with Auto-Stop for 9 years, and when the feature wasn’t working (it disables when it is very cold out) it dropped my fuel economy about 3-5mpg, and that was for a fairly small (1.5L) motor. The savings are much greater for larger, more fuel hungry engines.
Again though, the feature does not require a new component, or special fuel, or interaction from the driver. We’re buying, burning, and wasting that extra fuel for no reason at all. No matter how small an amount it is, it’s worthwhile to save it when it costs us literally nothing to do so.
We can’t even get everyone onboard with incremental changes, how are we going to make massive changes?
You save 2 to 3 % on average and up to 7 % in pure city traffic.
Where are you that red lights are less than 10 seconds? Not many cars are going to get through a green light of below 10 seconds.
That just isn’t supported by real world data. Manufacturers may claim that but they make a lot of claims that only apply to factory testing conditions.
Real world testing comes to the same conversion. 10 % saving in pure city traffic can be expected.
Only stopping for 1.5 hours on red lights over 3 years makes you an super extreme outlier. Now you don’t specify the total distance in those 3 years, so perhaps you just don’t drive at all, but realistically people drive something like 10’000 km per year, average speed around 50 km/h, time spent driving about 30’000 km / 50 km/h = 600 h. To only get to 1.5 hours at red lights would mean 10 seconds per hour of driving. I hope that makes it clear how unrealistic YOUR number is.
Yeah I’m not thinking so much stopping at lights and in traffic for this application, but something like if the parking brake is engaged and 15-30 seconds pass, then engine turns off. As the trucker in this thread noted, sometimes they’ll hop out expecting a quick stop and it balloons into 15 minutes of idle waiting on other people. Then there’s the drivers who will let the truck idle while getting loaded/unloaded just for climate controls… And thinking at scale saving even just a gallon, multiplied across a whole fleet, could be a big impact.
Of course there’s more thought to put in for secondary systems, but just strikes me as something that should be considered.