Should warm up your car’s engine before winter drives? Expert has the answer
A veteran mechanic has used history to justify his stance on whether you should pre-heat your engine before winter drives.
Drivers frequently go back and forth on whether you should warm up your car’s engine before a winter drive — so a mechanic has chimed in with his response based on 56 years of professional experience.
The internet-famous auto technician uploaded his answer to YouTube, beginning the video with a short history lesson to provide more insight into the motor-related topic.
Scotty (@scottykilmer) notes in his video that when he was young during the 1950s and 1960s, all vehicles featured carburetors with hand chokes.
The mechanic explains how, during this time, you’d start cars by pulling hand chokes, a component attached to the carburetor under a vehicle’s hood, resulting in the engine idling faster.
Hand chokes control a motor’s air-fuel mixture during cold starts.
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Once the engine warmed up, a driver would manually turn off the choke, so drivers were required to heat their motor as a result of the hand choke’s design.
This video’s technician says automatic chokes followed hand chokes — but clarified drivers would still wait for their motor to warm up before hitting the road.
Scotty then explains how fuel injector technology, which essentially replaced carburetors by the 1990s, was a game changer since it offered more control over a vehicle’s air-fuel mixture.
However, unlike modern fuel injection systems, older versions didn’t have a Mass Airflow (MAF) Sensor and were limited to one oxygen sensor, whereas newer cars can have up to four.
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MAF and oxygen sensors made fuel injection technology much more accurate by ensuring an engine always receives the right level of fuel, no matter the outside temperature, negating a driver’s need to warm up their motor.
Scotty adds that motorists driving modern vehicles should only have to warm up their cars to get the interior toasty after an event like a snowfall.
This mechanic, who has been working in garages since the 1960s, ends his video by highlighting how some people claim oil flows more freely through their modern car’s engine after it’s warmed up.
But Scotty reports that oil in modern cars flows immediately despite outside temperatures because of their lightweight nature.
