Automatic stop/start is arguably one of the most annoying features of any new car. It essentially shuts off your engine for short periods as long as your foot is on the brake, while keeping basic functions like the air conditioning and radio still running. Once you let off the brake, the engine kicks back on.
Automakers introduced this technology in an effort to improve fuel economy, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants it to stop. Head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, sent out a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that the agency is “fixing” the technology that “everyone hates:”
Stop/start technology isn’t new, though. It’s been around since the 1970s and grew more popular in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until the mid to late-2000s that auto stop/start really took off in the US. Although it was never mandated by the EPA, automakers who did implement stop/start in their vehicles would receive carbon credits under the Obama administration.
Currently, around 65 percent of new cars sold in the US have an automatic stop/start function, according to Axios. That’s up from an estimated 60 percent in 2022.
Annoying as it may be, according to a now-deleted paper by the EPA, automatic stop/start helps reduce fleetwide CO2 emissions at a rate of about 2.2 gallons per mile. A second study by the Department of Energy showed that automatic stop/start yields real-world improvements in emissions reduction and fuel savings. SAE International estimates that city driving with automatic stop/start equipped can yield fuel savings as high as 26.4 percent.
What’s unclear is exactly how Zeldin and the EPA plan to “fix” stop/start technology—other than simply doing away with it entirely. The EPA will likely release more information in the next few months.
The good news is that there’s already an easy “fix” for automatic stop/start that you can do at home: Just turn it off.
