Earlier this week, Lee Zeldin, top boss at the Environmental Protection Agency, announced via social media he will be directing his department to investigate “fixing” the start/stop systems found in modern vehicles.
Describing the feature, Zeldin said it is one in which “your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy,” Before going on to add that the “EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.”
Details beyond the electronic missive are, at present, relatively scarce. Whether the intended fix involves binning this feature altogether or encouraging automakers to simply allow a car to remember its last user-selected setting is unclear. Perhaps the EPA will incentivize its disuse by changing regulations around how fuel economy numbers are measured. At present, tests are conducted with the systems and features that are in place or active without intervention when a driver starts the car. That’s a massive oversimplification but gets the point across as to why most cars – at least with factory lines of code – don’t remember you turned it off in sport mode, for example.
Or, relevant to this story, the start/stop system. Getting in a car and hammering the button to disable that feature is the modern day equivalent of when we all used to turn off gear like prehistoric traction control, a feature which, thirty years ago, as just as likely to dangerously cut power as you tried to accelerate out of a dusty junction onto a main road as it was to help in slippery conditions.
While far from perfect (this author does absolutely manually mash the button to disable the system on some cars, or bump the brake pedal at a stoplight to ‘wake’ the car before the intersection goes green), some modern start/stop systems go about their business like a discreet butler, never really drawing attention to itself. Some systems do indeed remain infuriating, interrupting the delivery of air conditioning or cutting power steering assists. The best ones do neither and simply relight the fires quietly and smoothly.
As for the EPA and its intents, we’ll be staying alert for any indication on how they plan to roll out this initiative.
[Image: General Motors]
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