rev up your engines, today I'm going to answer the question, is it bad for your
car to sit and idle for long periods of time, over the years my customers and
internet viewers have said. Scotty is it bad for me to sit idling for long
periods of time in my car, because some guys say yes, some guys say no, what's the truth
well the truth depends on what type of car you have and what kind of places you
live in, let's say you have an old beater car, that's so old it has a
mechanical fan to cool the radiator that runs off the water pump, and you
live in a real hot area like Arizona, then in that case, idling for extended periods
of time isn't a good idea, your engine could easily overheat and it
can be dumping a little bit extra fueling in an old car and that will dilute
your oil and your engine will wear out, because there will be a lot of gasoline in
your oil and that's not a good thing, but if you have a modern car that you take
care of that has electric cooling fans, they pull in tones of air, you don't have to
worry about the car overheating, so even if you're running your AC, those fans are
sucking so much air through, you can sit there idling, it's not going to bother it
even with the AC on, now of course especially if your driving a gasoline car, you're
going to get bad gas mileage if it's just sitting there idling all the time, the car's not
going anywhere and it's still burning up gas, but for those of you with diesel
engines, some of these diesel engines when they're just idling, they're using
mainly air and very little fuel, so with a diesel idling you don't really care
that's why you see a lot of these trucks, they just leave them running all the
time, but you'll notice some modern cars have this auto stop feature, when you
come to a stop if you sit for any length of time, it shuts the engine off
and then when you step on the gas it automatically restarts the car, that's to
save gasoline and of course get better gas mileage, but let's say you're waiting
for a train and maybe you're in the Midwest and it's one of those grain trains
that goes for miles, you don't want to be sitting there idling for a really
long time with your car and drive, because with your car in drive, the
transmission is being operated, the torque converter is spinning and it's
got some drag on it, so if you're going to be sitting there idling for a while
here's a trick, either put it in park or neutral, because then the transmission
don't be dragging on a torque converter, and you won't have a problem with the
transmission which could overheat if you leave it and drive sitting there for
half an hour or more, I've seen people who leave it in drive and let it idle for a
really long time, and it can eventually do damage to the transmission by
overheating it, a transmission is not made to be sitting with a drag on it
with nothing running, it really needs to be moving down the road, the air blowing
through the radiator, cooling everything down, and not just sitting there getting hot
if you do have an older car with a lot of mileage, like this Ceilca, it's got
250,000 miles on it, if you're idling for a long period of time just sitting there
and you start to smell something, quick look under the car, and if you look under
there and find that the catalytic converter starting to glow red, you want to shut
the car off right away, because as I said before, if it's an old car it might be
putting a little bit too much gas into it, running a little bit rich, and that
can make the catalytic converter glow red which is dangerous because it's
going to burn it out and it could even start a fire when it gets that hot, but any modern
well kept up fuel-injected car, the computer makes it run so perfectly that
you're not going to get your catalytic converter glowing red from idling for a
long time, and let's say you're sitting somewhere, here's a trick I learned from
the police, they're sitting there for long periods of time and here in Texas it's hot
so they want to be inside their car with the a/c running, open your hood, give it a
pop, and lift it up a little, with it lift it up a little, the hot air will be able
to escape better and make it run as efficiently as possible, so now you know
idling your car for extended periods of time in any modern well kept up car isn't
really going to hurt anything, but of course it's going to be wasting fuel, I mean why
leave it running if you don't have to, but just to be on the safe side, like I
always am when I'm driving a car, keep your eye on the temperature gauge, glance
at it once in a while, because if something goes wrong and the temperature
gauge starts going towards the hot, shut it off then,
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell!