Should You Warm Up Your Car Before Driving in Cold Weather?

Monday, 14 March 2011 | by Pat's Picks

If you live somewhere warm you can skip this story. If you live somewhere really cold you’ll totally be able to relate to this one:

In this age of worry about carbon footprints, the cold weather practice of “warming up” the car seems naughty. I spotted an article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail on the weekend that tries to answer the question “Should you warm up your car first, or start it and go?”

If you’re driving in mildly uncomfortable winter temperatures like -10 celsius (14 fahrenheit) then I think there’s plenty of good advice in this article. Mostly, it leads you to the conclusion that you won’t do harm to your car if you “start it and go.”

But I don’t think the conclusions are valid for the nasty 40 below weather that visited for a few days each winter when I lived in Alberta. I got no sense from reading the article that anyone involved in it has ever started a car at minus 44 degrees as I have. When you start a car at those temperatures, the fluids are so stiff that power steering is reluctant and engine oil has thickened. And even if the mechanical experts say you won’t do damage to the car by skipping the warmup, you’ve got the issue of the temperature inside the passenger compartment. In extremely cold weather your own breath will quickly turn to frost on the glass and obscure your view of traffic. So I’m posting the article because I found it interesting, but also adding my own opinion that when it’s extremely cold I still believe a two or three minute warmup is a good idea.