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Turn off your car

Posted: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 9:25 AM by Barry Gervin

Some interesting facts about idling and turning off your car.

  • 10 seconds of idling uses as much gas as restarting your car. As a rule of thumb, if your car will be stationary for 10 seconds or more, turn it off to save gas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • The wear on components by the additional starting of your car will equate to about $10/year.
  • An idling engine releases twice as much exhaust fumes as a moving vehicle
  • If every light-duty vehicle's driver reduced idling by 5 minutes a day, this would result in 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emmissions in Canada annualy.

It's kind of fun to see how far you can coast with your engine off, but beware that power brakes and steering don't work when your ignition is off. If you're going to try this, make sure to practice with no cars around, especially mine :)

 

Comments

  • Barry Gervin July 12, 2006 2:30 PM

    Or buy a car that does this for you automatically.

  • Barry Gervin July 12, 2006 5:00 PM

    Ben, that's a great idea. An even better one is don't drive, walk, cycle, take public transit, car pool.

    Please feel free to comment on more ideas. The more the better.

    Some examples...

    Work where you live, live where you work. Work at home, move or change jobs.

    Is it an environmentally friendly idea to order your groceries over the internet and have them delivered instead of driving yourself. I guess that depends on variables such as how crummy their vehicles are compared to yours, how good is their milk run scheduling, etc.

    Keeping your car clean is supposed to improve your mileage. But what about water consumption? The car wash I go to reuses their water. That's better than me using the hose I guess. This may sound silly but most of the dirt on my car is "road dust". Can I dry clean/dust my car and get the same benefit?

    I'd love to see more references to scientific studies on what makes sense and what doesn't.

  • Barry Gervin August 4, 2006 7:54 AM

    Dear Barry,
    I spoke to my city council on Thursday about Global Warming and heard an Irish guy, a scientist at Mac, Dennis Cor give some alarming stats.
    Drivers idling at intersections are sucking up some major pollutants, cars do not protect us from what is outside. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and it underlines the urgency of the matter. Banning Idling is also about saving lives,schools are hot spots. Anyway do what you can my friend
    Love
    Your relative
    Ginny

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