“Stay cool while you warm up America “United States again.” With that brief message, the Trump Administration has declared war on the function Start & Stop that most cars have implemented for a few years. He has announced the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the measures to protect the vehicle, please the consumer and “fix a stupid feature” that slowly kills the car.
Where do we start?
ANDl advertisement. Here it is:
27 seconds of video send a very clear message: the Start & Stop button is unnecessary in a powerful car, turn off your air conditioning and it’s ‘woke’. It is also curious to see the number of errors there are in a video of just 27 seconds. And we are not just referring to the continuity failure when placing the red car first on the right and then on the left.
“Universally hated”. Beyond the video, there is a release in which the EPA is proud of the decision. In 2012, the EPA itself (under the Obama Administration) advocated for a system of rewards and subsidies to encourage the adoption of Start & Stop systems in vehicles. The operation is “simple”: when a car stops at the traffic light, the engine turns off. When it is idling, too, but the system ‘starts’ again as soon as we want to start driving again. The theory says that emissions and consumption are reduced, but Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, disagrees.
“As I traveled through all 50 states last year, countless Americans told me that they not only disliked the system, but wanted it to be a thing of the past. Not only do many find it annoying, but it kills the battery and has no benefit to the environment. Consumer choice is a priority for Trump’s EPA, and we are proud to continue delivering common sense for the American people,” says the administrator.
The importance of language. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy notes that removing incentives for brands to stop adding the feature will “make cars more affordable again by eliminating a stupid requirement that is universally hated.” The statement as a whole is very interesting because it is difficult to see an official document using such… passionate language.
And it demonstrates the importance of language to reach exactly the population you want to reach. In just a few paragraphs and in external statements in which it is said that “everyone hates him”, he has been baptized as an “Obama switch” (when it is also in the rest of the world) and it is stated that “it kills the battery without any significant benefit to the environment”, they send a very powerful message.
There is sometimes a misconception that these systems are bad for the engine or starting, so some drivers disable the functionality” – Alex Knizek, director of automotive testing development at Consumer Reports
Raising an eyebrow. But no matter how powerful it is, it does not imply that it is true. The system was not invented by Obama, but was a response to the oil crisis from the 80s. Like many other technologies, it was widely applied decades later, but the idea is simple: if the engine is turned off when it can be turned off, it will consume less and emit less CO₂. We don’t say it: the United States says it. Well, the Department of Energy in a analysis.
In the technical study, they tested four vehicles with and without Start & Stop in three situations: urban cycle (FTP), aggressive cycle (US06) and cycle in New York. The result was that there were consumption improvements of up to 7.27% in the FTP cycle and up to 26.4% in New York, a city in which 38% of the journey is spent idling (the engine continues running, polluting and consuming). Canada also measured improvements in consumption of between 4 and 10% depending on conditions.
Or both. Here the logic is overwhelming: less engine time running, greater fuel savings and lower emissions. And here you may be thinking that it is true that the system is sometimes annoying, the battery suffers and the air conditioning stops working. There is an asterisk in this matter and it all depends on whether the car is combustion, hybrid and even how the system has been designed.
In a combustion car, if the engine is turned off, the air conditioning is turned off. The fan keeps pulling air and pushing fresh air until it runs out. At a traffic light it is something that is barely noticeable. In a hybrid, the most common thing is that the air conditioning system is regulated by the electrical system, so that problem would not be present (and the Prius in the advertisement above is a hybrid). Logic tells us that the battery suffers more by having more work and increasing cycles, but the industry and consumer organizations (such as the American Consumer Reports) point to reinforced electrical systemsprecisely to withstand the overload.
And something more important: there is no evidence of massive failures attributed to this technology and the moments in which it is not activated may be because, consciously, the system is protecting a battery that may be about to die or in poor condition.
Volantazo and “drill, baby, drill”. But it doesn’t matter the evidence because Zeldin is proud to have signed “the largest deregulatory action in US history.” It is the continuation of the shift in climate policies that Trump’s second presidency has embarked on. They claim that there is no scientific evidence that the climate changeor put health at risk or to environment and his battle in cars is not only against the Start & Stop button. Also against other technologies such as the reuse of engine heat to heat the interior of the car, the use of reflective paint for better passive insulation or research into more efficient fuels.
Locking this, and stopping giving “environmental credits” to manufacturers who adopt these measures, the United States continues on that path of climate denial. In this policy we see strategies such as “drill, baby, drill” to boost drilling for fossil fuels instead of following the renewable path.
Fortunately…that is in the United States and, despite the statement, manufacturers are not being prohibited from installing Start & Stop. It is only ending the incentives for them to do so, which does not imply that brands will continue implementing these technologies in the rest of the world. Because the US can stop these incentives, but in other countries policies that seek to reduce the carbon footprint and climate change continue.
Images | The White House, Michael Lock
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