Two good pieces of news to start off our day:
- The New York Times has officially walked back its support for marijuana legalization.
- The government is preparing to revoke the mandate on stop-start engines in cars.
These are great things that should be celebrated.
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh, yay. The longer the stop/start thing held, the more it was going to distort the used car market down the road, with everybody trying to avoid those.
-ethyl
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The bastard who invented that evil contraption is a total evildoer.
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what is a start/stop engine?
Amanda
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A start/stop engine is an evil invention that wears out the engine in a gesture of planned obsolescence that enriches car manufacturers. It’s justified as environment ally friendly when it’s the exact opposite.
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When you stop at a stop sign or a light for more than a moment, it cuts the engine. Then, when you hit the gas to move, there’s a momentary pause, when it chugs to turn over. The pause and the chug can be annoying, but it boosts fuel efficiency and cuts down on the pollution that comes from idling cars.
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It switches off the engine creating extremely dangerous situations and damaging the environment.
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Most pollution from automobiles comes from the manufacturing process.
No amount of fuel efficiency makes up for manufacturing cars that will never reach 20yrs or 300k miles on the road.
-ethyl
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Exactly. This is terrible for the environment, as any planned obsolescence measure. Plus, it’s dangerous.
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yeah, every time you turn a car off, there’s a miniscule chance it’s not going to turn back on. When you’re doing that a couple of times a day, from a safe parking spot, no big deal, starter lasts a long time, etc.
What were they smoking to think it was a good idea to make the car stop and start again at every stop sign and traffic light? Did they redesign the starter to last 10x longer, or does it need replacing annually now? Now your miniscule risk of car not starting again is multiplied by however many times a day you roll to a stop anywhere, and your odds of getting stuck *in the road, in traffic* just went up by a zillion.
These are features that are only cool for people who buy a new car every five years.
To hell with everybody else, I guess.
-ethyl
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“every time you turn a car off, there’s a miniscule chance it’s not going to turn back on”
I still have…. very bad memories about the sound of a car not starting (or straining to start). Whoever created that is a sadist….
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I’ve never driven such a car myself but I have been in intersections where I expect the car in front to start moving and it doesn’t. There should be no unpredictable situations on the road that are purposefully manufactured to be unpredictable.
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Plus, there’s the implicit assumption:
“If you can’t afford to buy a new car, why are you even driving?”
I am not, and never will be, a fan of this attitude: willfully not understanding the secondary market for cars. The reason you can get a good trade-in for your 5yo car, is because somebody else is willing to buy it and drive it after you. Even if you do new cars, this should matter to you. Because most of the emissions happen in manufacturing, the longer you can keep a car running, the less pollution-per-mile happens, even if you’re no longer the one driving it. Amortization!
If you start making cars that aren’t worth buying used after 5 years, your trade-in value goes to $350, which is what you can scrap it for.
-ethyl
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last year I had to drive a rental car with that feature. In a large urban metro area. Have seldom had a normal car feature induce panic like that. Same car had electric parking brake that took me 10 minutes to locate. Because it was a tiny thumb switch. WTF?
-ethyl
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Yes, it’s particularly punishing to people in residential areas where there are endless stop signs. I call it “a mom penalty” because a woman driving her kids around will have this happen to her constantly.
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This is absolutely meant to force people to buy new cars every few years. And to use repair shops so much more often
That people who are not extremely rich and profiting from the industry would defend this daylight robbery is shocking. This is designed to make you and me poorer. Why defend it?
I’m seriously not getting this.
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