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Transportation

US Government Will Stop Pollution-Reduction Credits for Cars With 'Start-Stop' Systems (caranddriver.com) 304

Starting in 2009, the U.S. government have given car manufacturers towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions if they included "start-stop" systems in cars with internal combustion engines. (These systems automatically shut off idling engines to reduce pollution and fuel consumption.) But this week the new head of America's Environmental Protection Agency eliminated the credits, reports Car and Driver: [America's] Environmental Protection Agency previously supported the system's effectiveness, noting that it could improve fuel economy by as much as 5 percent. That said, the use of these systems has never actually been mandated for automakers here in the States. Companies have instead opted to install the systems on all of their vehicles to receive off-cycle credits from the feds. Virtually every new vehicle on sale in the country today also allows drivers to turn the feature off via a hard button as well. Still, that apparently isn't keeping the EPA from making a move against the system.
"I absolutely hate Start-Stop systems," writes long-time Slashdot reader sinij (who says they "specifically shopped for a car without one.") Any other Slashdot readers want to share their opinions?

Post your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Start-Stop systems — fuel-saving innovation, or a modern-day auto annoyance"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

US Government Will Stop Pollution-Reduction Credits for Cars With 'Start-Stop' Systems

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  • by LindleyF ( 9395567 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:03PM (#65989394)
    But they've gotten to the point of hardly noticeable. Perfect time to take pointless action against a non-problem.
    • by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:05PM (#65989400)

      Gotta kill a successful idea if it means your oil buddies who spend on your crytpo cash are gonna lose some sales.

      • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:15PM (#65989724) Homepage Journal

        Oil buddies he met at pedo parties, let's not forget that.

        • In all fairness, we don't know what percentage of Epstein's friends did not rape children but knew he was raping children and were fine with that for the benefits he brought, versus what percentage raped children and were glad for the benefits he brought. As for those who did not know he was raping children, well, the excuse for that ended with the 2008 nonprosecution deal. If a good friend of mine had to make a plea deal over child rape, I think I'd have serious trouble staying friends with them.

          • In all fairness, we don't know what percentage of Epstein's friends did not rape children but knew he was raping children and were fine with that for the benefits he brought, versus what percentage raped children and were glad for the benefits he brought. As for those who did not know he was raping children, well, the excuse for that ended with the 2008 nonprosecution deal. If a good friend of mine had to make a plea deal over child rape, I think I'd have serious trouble staying friends with them.

            It's interesting to observe that in order to have a basic level of functioning debate, societies need to have some sort of shared agreement. That used to be found in religion. It served as an ideal positive. As the authority of religion declined post-WWII, it was in some ways replaced by Nazism - everyone agreed that this was bad - a sort of ideal negative [ref: Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, by Tom Holland]. It's interesting to see how in US politics pedophilia is coming in as an alternative to

      • by Epeeist ( 2682 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @04:41AM (#65990002) Homepage

        Gotta kill a successful idea if it means your oil buddies who spend on your crytpo cash are gonna lose some sales.

        It might help Trump's oil buddies, but his actions are probably going to kill off the chance of the US car industry exporting to other countries.

        Norway may be an outlier in car sales [lifeinnorway.net] at the moment, but as the world buys more electric and hybrid cars, American car manufacturers are going to have to make a choice. Do they stick to Trump engine cars, or look to manufacture what everyone in the rest of the world is using.

        • A question before that is, do US car manufacturers know that the world outside the US exists? They make their giant gas-guzzlers for the US market and leave the compact, fuel-efficient cars the rest of the world wants to Japan, Korea, and other countries.
      • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @12:09PM (#65990394)
        This has absolutely nothing to do with oil executives or car manufacturers. The engine-auto-stop thing has been in the right wing media recently and is considered an example of woke-gone-bad because supposedly destroys engines. Like 99 percent of what you hear from this admin, the announcement is largely fluff to make the MAGA people feel good about themselves.
    • But they've gotten to the point of hardly noticeable.

      You mean that you have become accustomed to them. The start/stop systems themselves have not changed at all.

      So, while your perception has changed, that doesn't really speak to the veracity of the system nor whether or not this action is pointless.

      For me, personally, I don't care for the system. But, since I can disable it on my vehicle, it doesn't interfere with me anymore. However, I do not like that the manufacturers are getting tax breaks for including the system in cars. Car manufacturers don't need any

  • by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:06PM (#65989402)

    This pairs well with the runaway temperatures we're starting to see.

    I was hoping to retire to Hawaii, but maybe the UP.

    • I've been thinking the same thing. The UP just sounds awesome... but with our luck, some company will go up there and start polluting the region with something highly toxic, making that area about as livable as Love Canal or Lake Erie was in the '70s.

  • From having this system available for everybody to disable it versus not having this system available at all? I might be wrong and/or not have the right friendship and working peers circle, but I am yet to find one person who actually said the auto stop start engine was one of the reasons why they purchased that particular vehicle.

    • I had a cat with that system. It was useful. Saved some money on petrol.

      Did I go out to buy a car with it? No?

      Would I NOT buy a car because it did or didn't have it? No

      Do I think they should be in every ICE car? They probably should. Although I'd be more in favour of ICE cars disappearing, TBH.

      Will car manufacturers now remove these from future vehicles to save themselves money, whilst also not passing those savings on to customers? Yes, they absolutely will

      • Cat! FFS! Slashdot needs an edit button.

        • by znrt ( 2424692 )

          nah, fun typo.

          btw, my pretty old car has and the dealer had to explain to me what it was. i actually like it. i mostly drive on country roads and speedways but it's nice in the city and saves a bit of precious fuel, avoids a bit of pointless polluting. unlike cats it has also a button to deactivate it in case someone gets fed up for some reason. oh, technology! cats could use one of those too! and the problems humans have ...

        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Cat! FFS! Slashdot needs an edit button.

          Glad you called out the error. I initially assumed you were talking about a dozer.

    • by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:14PM (#65989424) Journal

      From having this system available for everybody to disable it versus not having this system available at all?

      The difference is that the mere existence of such systems is a reminder to Trump of the Obama era, so they gotta go.

    • From having this system available for everybody to disable it versus not having this system available at all?

      Ask Sinij. He's apparently made it a defining feature of his car purchase. And yes based on everything he's every said about cars here on Slashdot I fully believe him.

    • >"From having this system available for everybody to disable it versus not having this system available at all?

      Because the F'ers make it so the setting is not remembered and you have to turn it off EVERY TIME you start the car. That is the major difference.

      And the extra cost for it to be there- larger more complex starter, more electronics. And the extra weight. And the extra wear. And the additional delay from want to go immediately. And it doesn't save much at all on fuel. And what if your AC is

  • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:07PM (#65989408) Homepage
    I, for once, really like start-stop. It does automatically, what I was doing by other cars manually. And I really don't understand what people are arguing against it.
    • by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:19PM (#65989432) Journal

      Some guys just get a woodie from burning fossil fuels. The more, the better. Ever seen those rigs they use for coal-rolling? [wikipedia.org]

    • Old people are scared of new things. They’re finally ok fuel injection and seatbelts.

    • I hate it because I have a dangerous intersection at the end pf my street. Great visibility one way, terrible the other way. But that’s the way I”m going 99% of the time. City won’t fix the light that warned of approaching traffic. So when I go, I need to go right then, not in a half second or so in case someone comes flying over the hill. There’s a button to turn it off, but you have to use it at every start. I could go the other way, but then that’s a half-mile detour through
    • Few years ago, we got a long term rental due to a wreck, and it was the first time weâ(TM)d ever experienced it. It was the middle of winter, cold and snowy, and the colder it got, the longer it took for the starter to kick in when we would come to a stop. A few times Iâ(TM)d come to an intersection, try to accelerate to get through it, but the car would turn off the split second before I accelerated, and I would be terrified I was going to be hit because I wasnâ(TM)t used to having to think

  • by Another Random Kiwi ( 6224294 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:09PM (#65989412)
    I recently rented an SUV with auto start/stop - my daily driver does NOT have that feature. If you're stopped at a traffic light, wheels straight, it's not too annoying - it starts as you take your foot off the brake and doesn't impede your pulling away. If, however, you have the wheels turned - when it shuts off it immediately loses the power steering, and, for some reason (at least on this vehicle) the steering wheel jerks back from the angle you're holding it at. Really annoying.
    • I can't stand start/stop. When I rent a car with it, I immediately disable it. It's "jerky-ness" varies with manufacturers. I'll be glad to see it go.

      • It will not "go away", it was never required. All the EPA did was announce they'd stop giving automakers "pollution-Reduction Credits" for installing the non-mandated, optional to use, fuel-saving annoyance/feature.

        I expect automakers will start featuring the theoretical fuel savings the stop/start feature offers.

    • My father installed a kit in his Toyota that reversed the start/stop disable switch, turning it into an enable switch instead.

  • should be sentenced to an eternality of herding cats. They are absolutely vile in places with stop lights at every corner. Disabled it immediately on my wife's last vehicle.

    • Because ... reasons? I mean we can use the word vile without backing it up or giving any specifics. I'm curious what your complaint is. As far as I can tell it has precisely zero impact on my driving, stop lights or not. What is it about a completely automated system that has no impact on you stopping or driving that makes you have trouble stopping or driving?

  • by ve3oat ( 884827 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @07:23PM (#65989436) Homepage
    I drive a hybrid. When the engine isn't needed, as in idling, it automatically stops running. (Saves gas and pollution.) The car is still On and when I take my foot off the brake or touch the accelerator pedal, the engine automatically comes to life again. What could be simpler? Saves gas and pollution. But some big companies and many car owners have this love affair with gasoline. I am afraid that they hasten the coming lethal effects of global warming. (For details, read "The Next Civil War" by Stephen Marche (2022), well researched and very prophetic.
    • I bought myself a hybrid a few months ago. Auto start/stop on it makes perfect sense, especially when the electric motor is there to do part of the work. I have to actually concentrate hard to even notice when the engine fires up or powers down.

      On the other hand, when it's a pure ICE vehicle, I'm not a big fan. Most of the time it's tolerable, but three months ago, I was driving an Expedition that shut off the engine while I was idling at a frontage road waiting to make a turn onto the street. When I be

      • Auto start/stop systems can be buggy. I had a 2019 Jetta that had a bug associated with the windshield wipers and auto start/stop. If you had the wipers on in rain, they'd freeze up if the start/stop system engaged and stopped the engine at a red light (for example). Then when the engine started back up, it would throw an error on the dash and the wipers wouldn't function until fully cycling the engine. The car was still drivable, but driving in the rain with stuck wipers is not safe. . .

      • by Binestar ( 28861 )
        The battery in that car has low voltage and should be replaced.
    • The critical difference is that a hybrid can drive the car with the engine off, a start-stop system can only restart the engine before driving.
      I also drive a hybrid. I think that the start-stop our hybrids are capable of is very different than the start-stop for an otherwise ICE vehicle, where all they've maybe done is put a bigger stronger starter motor in it. That means it takes up to a second to start driving with a start-stop system, which I can see as annoying.
      Looking it up, the electric motors in my

      • It totally depends on the car. My previous diesel had start-stop.
        In the time it took me to take my foot of the brake and to push the accelerator it already started.
        Honestly if I did not look at the engine RPM I would not even notice it, doing its job.
    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      I drive a hybrid.

      That is not the same thing as being discussed here. Hybrids have electric motor that can move the car.

      • by ve3oat ( 884827 )
        Yes, you are correct, they do have an electric motor, and that is why they are so much better that an internal combustion engine. If everyone drove a hybrid or an electric vehicle, we wouldn't even have to discuss this.
  • (Note: we own a 2015 Camry and a 2019 Outback, neither of which has this feature)

    I was helping my mom shop for a car. We went to CarMax - she had her eye on a Kia Soul. Well I pulled out of the lot (she wanted me to drive, don't ask me why) and got to a stoplight... and the tach goes to zero. I'm thinking "that's weird", and turned the key - started right up and we moved along. Then it died again at the next light... and again... I was wondering how the CarMax guys missed such an obvious problem.

    After sever

    • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      Off is still better than any amount of idle. The starters in cars that have start/stop systems are designed specifically to handle it. Disabling the system will not give any significant extra prolonged life of those types of starters.

      • You seem to be saying that using something dozens of times an hour causes no appreciable wear compared to not using something at all.

        I would think that if a starter motor has a design life of 100,000 operations, it is better to spread those operations over 50 years than maybe 18 months.
        Your driving conditions may vary, mine have the start-stop operating a hundred times in an hour's commute. Yes, my vehicle slows to 0mph a hundred times on an hour's commute. Yes, the traffic planners are well paid.

    • I started noticing cars at intersections and around me were dying and then starting up again and figured somebody got smart until I noticed how fast and common it became. The reason I noticed is because I had a cheap EV and could hear everything around me while my old ICE car either dampened the outside sound or drowned it out from it's engine.

      If you plan to accelerate quickly as possible then the feature is going to bother you. If you pause and make sure nothing is going wrong (like somebody going thru re

    • I'm not sure I believe it makes much difference in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or fuel economy, since modern cars do idle very efficiently.

      Stop-start is meant to do most good in dense urban areas, where the concentration of cars is higher, as well as that of people. Reducing the number of vehicles running at busy intersections can make a surprisingly large difference to air quality. There are some modest reductions in fuel usage to be had but as with hybrids they're mostly realised in city traffic. (A hybrid doesn't get better mileage when cruising than a non-hybrid with an equivalent ICE engine.)

      But, in the grand scheme of things, this seems like a silly thing to get up in arms about... which describes a LOT of the pronouncements coming out of this administration.

      It's definitely a repeal-whatever-Obama-did thi

  • I've been on multiple off-road trail drives where at least one newer Jeep Wrangler had it's start/stop system start fail in some way and couldn't keep running because of how Chrysler implemented the system on those engines.

    One had to be limped home with an escort 15 minutes at a time, the engine would just stop while in gear and ignore the gas pedal until it was fully switched off and restarted, code reader kept saying errors in the start/stop system, etc.

    The other one just didn't risk it, called a tow truck and opted to wait. Code reader also said start/stop system fault codes when we looked them up. Different Jeep from the previous one, BTW!

    Start/stop is basically built in for hybrids, but for non-hybrids they're often just a boat-anchor mis-feature along with cylinder de-activation that mostly only exists to game EPA numbers.

    A well engineered one that for example has an electric power steering pump and brake master cylinder that doesn't rely on the engine running to maintain pressure? Can be good.

    But that still needs a MUCH stronger starter to survive even a single heavy-traffic commute where it will cycle 20+ times in an hour and only a few minutes in between to recharge, let alone years of that, and stronger/larger alternator and battery to handle the much more frequent rapid charge/discharge cycles, etc.

    And at that point you're most of the way to a mild hybrid, so the good ones just get turned into a true hybrid model at that point.

    So as a Prius owner? Good riddance to this, IMHO. It never really fits well on non-hybrids because so many other things are tied to the engine running and moving those off is most of making a vehicle a hybrid already.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      Jeeps are just built like shit in general. Nothing to do with the stop/start system itself.

      • It's the same start/stop system and engine as the Ram 1500 pickups have used since 2013 (and still use today in fact), so it's not a Jeep-specific thing in this case, just I've encountered it twice because of the prevalence of Jeeps off-roading and they don't get the 'commercial vehicle' exception to being able to make the ESS optional at purchase time.

  • 2000 Honda Insight (Score:5, Informative)

    by John_Sauter ( 595980 ) <John_Sauter@systemeyescomputerstore.com> on Saturday February 14, 2026 @08:03PM (#65989490) Homepage

    In the year 2000 I bought a Honda Insight, an early hybrid. I was surprised to find that it had start-stop: when I stopped at a traffic control signal it shut off the motor, then started it up instantly when I pressed the accelerator. A few times the driver of the car in the adjacent lane looked startled when the sound of my motor stopped.

    The Insight had wonderful fuel economy. I once got 73.5 miles per gallon on a 109.4-mile stratch of Interstate 90.

    I used that car as my daily driver until 2018, when I traded it in on a Nissan Leaf, an electric car, which I drive today,.

    • No that's not possible. You must be lying. Everyone here on Slashdot insists that cars with auto-start/stop are unreliable and fail early, so it is lies that your car lasted 18 years! /sarcasm

      You're on point though, my previous car had auto start/stop as well. I had it for 10 years and it was 7 years old when I bought it. And when I scrapped it, I did so not because of battery, engine, or starter motor issues.

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @08:21PM (#65989520) Journal

    ....so when I get home, I drive into the garage, come to a stop, car kills.
    So I press the button to turn the car off 1 sec later, it restarts ... so it can then shut off.

    ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.

    Here's an idea: let me, as a consumer, decide if that "energy savings" is worth my hard earned $0.000266 ?

    I don't even think people would mind much if it was installed by default. It's the "automatically on whenever you start the car" that's bullshit.

    But...ecomarxists know better than the rest of us.

    • by Phylarr ( 981216 )
      On my car, if you press the button with your foot off the brake, it will always turn off. So put on the parking brake, take your foot off the brake, and press the start/stop button: car turns off even if already killed.
  • What annoys me the most is on a hot day and when the engine shuts off, so does the A/C. I can't stand the heat, so in the summer the first thing I do is turn the damned auto-stop off.

  • Let the smaller, 2nd battery that powers it die. When it inevitably failed in my Grand Cherokee, I left it in the car. Now the Jeep says, "Start/Stop system unavilable" in the menu, and I never have to turn off the Stop/Start after forgettng to disable it when I start the car.

    (Of all the bullshit Trump's EPA has done, they actually got this policy change right. The Start/Stop system was an awful idea from Day 1.)

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Mecha... [reddit.com]

    covers issues fairly well. Modern vehicles are driving (pun inevitable!) many techs from the industry due to excessive complexity.

    The best way to avoid modern hypercomplex vehicles raping your wallet is lease, don't own, so you can hand it back and let it destroy someone else's wallet.

  • My wife's car had start/stop and it killed the starter with just 54k miles on it at 6 years. Now I disable the crap in all of our vehicles, it's not normal to start stop engines like this without a hardware cost. I would much rather feed my car slightly more gas than deal with paying someone to perform major work.

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