Vehicle Start/Stop Feature To Be Retired? Let's Hope So!

 

President Trump and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin are strongly considering eliminating the incredibly annoying start/stop technology that forces your car to die every time it comes to  a stop, supposedly helping to save the environment by conserving fuel and fighting climate change. If they follow through with this, they should immediately be placed on a driver’s Mount Rushmore. I will help pay for the project.

Zeldin recently tweeted: "Start/stop technology: where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we're fixing it.”

God bless him. I can’t tell you how many times the guy in back of me has almost rear-ended me as a light turns green, impatient to get going while my car has to start up again and then get rolling. And don’t even get me started on stop-and-go traffic. Once, on a holiday weekend trip up to the cabin on construction constipated roads, I bet my car stopped-and-started well upwards of 100 times in a roughly 35-mile stretch of highway because the system, for some reason, did not let me disable it. (I later found out the problem was temperature related.) I don’t care what the manufacturer or the experts say, that can’t be optimal for the battery or the engine. It’s also a potential hazard whenever you lose the ability to operate the vehicle, however briefly.

I know some lawmakers had been considering forcing automobile manufacturers to fit all new vehicles with software that would render vehicles inoperable if a driver was supposedly intoxicated. And would potentially allow those in power to remotely disable the vehicle for other reasons.

Talk about a slippery slope. Had a couple beers? Disabled. Quite tired? Not going anywhere. Telematics showing you speeding? Braking too harshly? Changing lanes too frequently? Shelter in place. Smell of weed? Chill out. Everyone in the country would be stalled on the road.

Got a Trump sticker on your bumper? You’re going nowhere soon, buddy.

Nobody likes dangerous/distracted drivers, but it is clearly not in government’s purview to disable its citizen’s vehicles, remotely or otherwise.