Pet peeve: people who idle their cars' engines for a seeming eternity

I have no problem with remaining inside an idling car so a driver and/or passengers can remain warm. But I do get annoyed when people warm their car's engines up for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even longer.

My downstairs neighbor has a gigantic 4x4 pickup truck. In the morning, he keeps that thing running in the driveway for at least a half-an-hour; and in my apartment, it reverberates throughout the walls like it's a Sherman tank. Even on the weekends, he keeps the truck idling in the driveway for 20-30 minutes at a time before finally turning it off.

:mad:

:D

:)

To make it worse, he has one of those after market LOUD mufflers to make his little Honda sound like "teh shit".

But around here we have a bunch of reckless young men with (I am assuming) small penii driving around in their Japanese cars with the loud mufflers acting all cool.

On my deadend street in North Plainfield, NJ. Drove me bats; I couldn't wait to move. How DO they get those through inspection? Modify them temporarily and then switch them back?

Why do municipalities allow that crap?

Loved the crack about small penii! That has to be the reality. They're always little sh!ts driving them, little pipsqueaks.

And even then, it's easy as hell to get around. You just register the car in the name of a friend/family member who lives outside of Milwaukee, and you never have to get your car inspected. I have a hardcore repuke relative on my Mom's side of the family that's been doing this for years.

Take the mods off, take your car for inspection, pass inspection, come home, re-place the modded part. Rine and repeat every inspection.

It should just be 'make his little Honda sound like shit'. :P

:scared: :scared:

Once I was refilling my tank when a minivan pulled up on the opposite side of the island. A man got out of the passenger's side and started to refill his tank - with the engine still running. As if that wasn't bad enough, the woman in the driver's seat hung out the window, dangling a lit cigarette.

I was so happy to get out of there.

People sometimes forget the stations are pumping gasoline and not water.

from a distance, of course. :evilgrin:

gasoline has a flashpoint of 47 degrees F. Of course telling that to somebody who smokes in a gas station is a complete waste of time as 47 is waaaay above their IQ.

Write:

HEY ASSHOLE YOU DON'T NEED TO IDLE YOUR FUCKING GAS GUZZLER FOR HALF AN HOUR

To make sure he sees it, write it on his door. With your key.

That should do the trick

the exhaust pipes.
:evilgrin:

:rofl:

in college, i lived in a three unit building in which the garages ran under two of the bedrooms (one of them mine). the family downstairs had the garage right under my room and the husband left for work around 5 or 5:30 in the morning. i can understand that and i could deal with the garage door being opened and closed so he could leave. what i could not understand was why he had to start his car (which apparently had no muffler) 30 minutes before he left and rev it repeatedly not only when he started it, but also when he left.

i finally went downstairs and said that i understood that he had to leave early but asked politely that he not idle his car so long. let's just say he was not so understanding x(

and he didn't want to get into a cold car

he kept it in the garage and he didn't have to worry about frost/ice/defogging...he just didn't want a cold car

and idle their small army of SUVs for 20 or more minutes, every goddamn day of the year, twice a day.

with your wife, instead of sitting and waiting for her with your engine running, would you?"

Redstone

You'd think they were driving some car from the 1940s. Modern cars don't need to be warmed up like that.

so I could LET mine warm up for 5 minutes... but alas, I always jump in it cold.

Or some information about how hurtful idling is to all the little children around? There is a whole bunch of information on the net.

http://suvratk.blogspot.com/2007/08/idle-threat.html


I cross Law college road everyday on my way to soccer practice. The traffic is an endless stream, and sometime back I told the other coaches that I will be coaching from the other side of the road. At the Prabhat road signal and at Nul stop the back-up is so bad, you could easily miss 3 or even 4 signals before crossing the intersection. Urban legends about these backups are growing. Just last week a woman gave birth in her car waiting for the signal. Most vehicles keep their engines idling during their wait. That gave me the idea for this blog. How much pollutants does your vehicle emit when you wait for a few minutes at a traffic signal? How much does the entire city of Pune emit?

I first had an inkling that the amounts were big when I noticed at truck stops in the U.S. that the truckers never shut down their engines. A little web research told me this astonishing fact:

Trucks in the United States consume about 1 billion gallons of diesel annually while idling! This amounts to about 11 million tons of CO2 emitted annually (Source: U.S. Dept. of Transportation). Overall the transport system in the U.S consumes 8.4 billion gallons of fuel annually while idling. This amount to about 83 million tons of CO2 emitted annually while idling.

Edit: Based on EPA chemistry of fuel combustion 1 billion gallons will emit about 10.1 million tonnes of CO2, but the EPA warns that "calculations and the supporting data have associated variation and uncertainty".

Using vehicle numbers from the Pune Municipal Corporation Env. Status Report, emission factors for various pollutants from a World Bank study and some assumptions about mileage and idling times I did some calculations for Pune. The numbers do not give any comfort.

On a daily basis, assuming a vehicle idles for just 2 minutes every day:

The total fuel consumed in Pune by idling cars, two wheelers and rickshaws amounts to an incredible 19 thousand litres per day! Emissions of greenhouse gases amount to 45 tonnes/day.

How much do all of us on an individual basis contribute? Graphs below estimates how much fuel is consumed and how much CO2, PM10 and SOx is emitted by your vehicle every year if you idle your engine for just 2 minutes every day waiting for the light to turn green.

window.

I love not being able to fall asleep because high beams are lighting up my bedroom. :eyes:

Fortunately, only certain guests do this as the parking space in front of my window is presently unoccupied.

at my apt complex a guy does it with his MOTORCYCLE - THIS IS F***ING TEXAS fer chrissakes - it is simply not necessary to EVER warm up a vehicle for that long

When my tank unit was out on maneuvers in Germany, we used to idle our Humvees all night and huddle inside to take advantage of the heat. Granted, military Humvees are diesels, not gas burners, but still, the carbon emissions had to have been catastrophic...

When it's -10 out, you want to get that oil, transmission fluid, and antifreeze warmed up before you start doing your serious driving because once that freezing cold wind starts blowing through your radiator you're never going to get heat in the car. Not to mention that steel gets more brittle with cold and you don't want to risk snapping something expensive.

A half-hour is excessive, though. I usually do it for no more than 10 minutes.

Actually, I don't even do it anymore, now that I think about it. I live three-quarters of a mile from work. Two minutes, no more, so I just start the car up, let it run for maybe a minute so the oil gets through the engine and tranny, then just basically ease the car down the road to my apartment.

And when I go to pick up my kid I have to drive all the way through town first, which gives my car time to heat up, waiting at stoplights and such.

but when I was driving a half-hour to work... oh, yeah, I warmed my car up. Otherwise I wouldn't get anything heatwise until I was almost home!

Rattling my house (because of his "overcompensating for something lacking in his pants" loud muffler).

I have freight trains going past my place several times a day that are significantly quieter than those types of vehicles. Well, except for the train horn...

Very little insulation. Our drywall is only 3/8" thick versus 5/8" in Minnesota. It takes nothing to put a hole in the wall here.

If you have a foreign visitor, drive them to the largest supermarket possible - even if it's an hour away. Get out of the car, leave it running, and lock it with another set of keys. Then you buy two 2 liter bottles of soda - one for each of you (ok, more soda if you've got more people - still, one giant bottle each). As you drive away, start drinking from the two liter bottle. After a few swigs, throw it out of the car window - because you were done.

Your thread reminded me of that :rofl: