Reply to I work on cars. AMA

Forum Index » Cars and Transportation

Reply to "I work on cars. AMA "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most of my driving during the week is to take the kids to and from school. It's 10 minutes there. 10 minutes off while I take them in side, then 10 minutes back. Twice a day. Based on your previous post, this isn't great for the car as it's not running long enough. Any suggestions, other than driving circles around my block and annoying my neighbors? We do get longer drives done on the weekends. It's an Audi 2.0 4-cylinder TFSI (turbo) engine if that makes a diffrence.[/quote]

So in that sort of driving profile, a few things are happening. None are good.

1) your exhaust system is accumulating water inside it, and staying moist, which will eventually corrode it. Yours is made of stainless steel, but the muffler internals and catylist housing is mild steel. That will eventually rust. When gasoline is burned, the biggest by product of that combustion is water vapor. Ideally, the exhaust system will get hot enough during a drive to ensure that all that water stays in a gaseous state all the way out the exhaust system. But before it gets that hot, the rear parts of the system are still cool, and the water vapor condenses there. Unless you get the exhaust hot enough to boil off that water, it’ll have moisture in it.

2) the battery isn’t being charged enough by so litttle driving. You’re in a constantly descending charge state that will eventually not be able to start the car. Think of it like this- this is just a hypothetical, but accurate- let’s say it takes 10:30 of running to replace the electrical charge used to start the car. But you only drive 10:00. So each time, the battery gets :30 too little charge. Over time, that cumulative effect will slowly drain the battery

3) your engine oil isn’t getting hot enough to boil off the contaminants from the gasoline being burned. Same deal as the water in the exhaust, except it’s petroleum contaminants instead of water. Hot oil boils them off and sends it into the PCV system to be burned and disposed off in the exhaust.

Pick one day a week and drive for thirty minutes to an hour, ideally at highway speeds. Also, really get on the throttle aggressively and run it very hard a few times on these weekly drives. Plus, your car is a lot of fun. Go enjoy the performance. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics