Why YSK: People seem to, on average, think that a car takes a lot of fuel to start up. In reality, it takes on the order of a few millilitres of fuel to start an engine. That means if your car isn’t equipped with an automatic start/stop system to stop your engine instead of idling, it saves fuel to turn off your engine and start it back up when you need it.
Caveat: air conditioning and radio might not work with the engine turned off.
Scenarios where this might be useful include waiting for trains to pass at rail crossings, waiting for food at drive-throughs, dropping off or picking people up on the side of the road when they need to load stuff, etc. May not be a good idea to use this while waiting at a red light because starting the engine does take time which would annoy drivers behind you when the light turns green.
Some cars are equipped with systems that will automatically stop the engine when you are idling for a while (e.g. waiting for a red light). If yours is, then manually turning off your engine will probably result in reduced fuel savings compared to just relying on the car to do it for you.
Chiming in to agree that the scenarios listed are mostly ridiculous to think about turning your car off. Knowing that ~7 seconds of idle time is a reasonable threshold for just turning off your car is certainly useful, but how many times has someone turned the ignition key and the car hasn’t started due to battery drain or some other failure? Now imagine that happening at a stoplight, a drive-thru, or a rail crossing.
Seriously, this is some malinformed groupthink. How thafuq does anyone think that it’s safe at any point to be a stationary object in the middle of the damn road?! Assuming your car starts right back up again without any issue (non-zero chance of a wide array of complications there), why would you choose to add several seconds to your reaction time in an unforeseen emergency where a fraction of a single second could be the difference between life or death — and not just your own?! Fuck. This very notion is so disgustingly self-absorbed and short-sighted. Christ on a stick.
Man, this sounds so american.
Not very often one finds a low-effort burp of a comment in the wild here. Reddit is clearly leaking from its lower levels now. 🤗