As often as I can, I get around on my 300cc Yamaha scooter, a blatty little buzzbomb of a thing that gets me almost anywhere I'd like to go. Generally speaking, it's rated at 75 miles to the gallon, which isn't half bad.
But I get in the low to mid 80s. My last three tanks came in at 84 mpg, in a mix of highway droning and suburban errand-running. There are reasons for this, but the primary one is that once the engine is warmed up, I turn it off whenever I stop. As I pull up to a red light, I hit the engine kill switch, and coast in slowly. I'll then sit there for a bit. Ten seconds, maybe twenty. Thirty, at some of the more annoying ones. Then, as the light changes and before the drivers around me look away from their phones, I'll blip the starter button. Off I go. No muss. No fuss.
I began this habit three rides ago, when my aging Yamaha YZF600R sportbike was struggling with a cooling system issue. I'd kill the motor at stops, because if I didn't, the poor ol' thing would overheat. I noticed then that I got a notable improvement in range as a collateral benefit of having to kludge a ratbike. I've done it ever since, and increasingly, so have our cars.
Once we bought our first hybrid, our trusty fuel-sipping Prius did that as part of its design. If you weren't on the gas, the internal combustion engine would just cut out, and you'd be either coasting or running on battery. Our current Accord Hybrid does exactly the same thing. The manual transmission Opel I drove on a trip to Ireland did it. The big V8-powered Mercedes Benz S-Class I recently rented for a road trip to Dollywood and Nashville? Same deal.
Auto start/stop generally gets you about 5% more range, all things being equal. On my scooter, it's more like 12%. I spend less money. I use less fuel. I go farther. In the instruction manual for the scoot, Yamaha straight up tells you to do it. "Want to save money? Just turn the engine off every time you stop," says the manufacturer. Starter motors are sturdy things, over engineered for countless use-cycles, or so I recall when talking to the mechanics at the alternator and starter dealer where I worked for a summer.
There's no downside at all, way I see it. I'm no fan of things that don't work. But if you can improve a product so gets the job done and saves me money, I'm there.
But apparently, some folks think saving money is a problem. "It's annoying," they'll say, because being reminded that you're getting 5% more range every time the car fires up again is apparently something they dislike. "It slows me down," they'll say, even though it does not. "It wears out your engine," they'll say, showing that they don't know a danged thing about modern internal combustion engines.
This regime being what it is, auto start/stop has been targeted by Lee Zeldin, a fossil-fuel-use enthusiast who was appointed to be current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. "We're going to fix that," he said. "Everyone hates it." Everyone, eh? Golly, I better go along with the herd, then.
The EPA, encouraging us to be less efficient, less thrifty, and less practical? The EPA, celebrating pointless waste? Lord have mercy, we're in Htrae.
It's like wanting less efficient toilets, lightbulbs that produce more heat than light, wasteful showerheads, and going back to dishwashers that guzzle water and don't get your dishes clean. It's just one part foolishness, two parts cussedness, and a little pinch of mean-crazy.
I mean, you can already turn it off if you're a gullible, irritable, cantankerous fool. That's what the button is for. It ain't broke. So something else is going on.
Who benefits from our using five percent more gas? I mean, we don't.
But our new best friends in Qatar and Saudi Arabia sure do.
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