Here’s the Real Reason You Should Never Warm Up Your Car

Real reason: It takes longer, wastes fuel, and actually increases the wear and tear on your engine.

Let me summary it for you in simple way:

– it is always the best that when you start to drive your engine is warm, right? Yes, driving the car with cold engine is bad.
– so in the cold winter morning, you want the engine to get warm as soon as possible.
– and the best way to get the engine warm up quickly is to drive the car!
– what some people do is this bad way: they start up the engine, and let the engine run idle for a few minutes, to let the engine warm up, then drive away. This is BAD, because in this way the engine will well get warmed up, but in a very slow way, so you are actually let your car engine run in the BAD COLD CONDITION for a much longer time, when compared to really driving the car.
– by driving the car slowly after cold start, the oil inside the engine will warm up much faster, so the lubrication is taking place also much better, it is then good for the engine.

注：对柴油机而言，偶尔几次怠速加热发动机，也不是什么很大的危害。

Less time to warm up the engine = less wear

On cold winter mornings, some folks will fire up their cars and leave them running for 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes, thinking they’re reducing wear and tear (减少磨损) by letting their cars warm up gently. But Jason from Engineering Explained is here to explain why that’s a bad idea for your car.

The conventional wisdom that you should idle (怠速) your car up to operating temperature comes from the days of carburetors (化油器), which needed several minutes of idling to get to an operating temperature where they’d run smoothly. With fuel-injected engines, the ECU can adjust itself to idle perfectly even in sub-zero weather.

And as Jason explains, idling an engine doesn’t really build up much heat at all, compared to driving it.

Jason goes through the details of what happens in a cold engine, and points out the hidden damage of letting your car idle for a long time on a cold day: Engine oil dilution (稀释). It turns out, while you might have thought that letting your car slowly warm up was reducing wear and tear, all that idling time leads to raw gasoline seeping into the oil, breaking down the oil’s lubrication (润滑) properties and increasing the wear.

So what should you do? Start it up, make sure all your windows are clear of ice/snow/fog, and just drive the thing! The engine will warm up faster

, and therefore you’ll get nice warm heat coming out of the vents sooner, which is what you want anyway.

Watch for yourself and let a real engineer explain why you should stop warming up your car.