► Trump’s EPA head wants stop/start banned
► The system has its detractors
► But there are big hurdles to a ban
The head of the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency has said that the stop/start technology fitted to the vast majority of cars sold in America should be banned. This past Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin posted on X: ‘Stop/start technology: where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.’
Stop/start systems turn a car’s engine off when it’s stationary, then start it again just before you set off – as it says on the tin. In a manual, the engine usually turns off when you shift into neutral and fires up when you press the clutch back down. In an automatic, selecting park usually does the trick, and the engine restarts when you press the throttle.
The point of the endeavour is partly to save fuel that would otherwise be wasted with the engine idling. But the key reasoning is to reduce emissions. Engines run very inefficiently at idle and chuck out a lot of nasty emissions, particularly nitrogen dioxide. That’s shown in many air quality surveys showing very high levels of pollution localised around areas that are prone to heavy, mostly idling traffic. Take the idling engines away and air quality soon improves significantly.
It’s fair to say that plenty of drivers think stop/start systems are rather irksome. They can seemingly activate at random, and they undoubtedly do at inconvenient moments; older diesels tend to shudder back to life, too. But does everyone hate it, as administrator Zeldin claims? No. I don’t. And if you do, you can always turn it off.
A few things to note about Lee Zeldin. He’s a former attorney and politician who was a Trump ally during his first term as US President. He has absolutely no background in environmental law, science or policy as every other EPA head has had. He’s a prominent climate change sceptic. His sole qualification for one of the biggest jobs in US government – running a department created by Republican darling Richard Nixon – is his loyalty to Trump and his commitment to an agenda of deregulation.
That’s right, the purpose of the EPA has been flipped. It’s no longer there to protect the environment and public health through regulation. It’s there to remove those same regulations. Why? Because it costs a lot of money for the heavily polluting companies subject to those regulations to meet them; those same companies donate a lot of money to Trump and the Republican party and expect a return on that investment.
We’re not getting political here, by the way, just stating the facts of the matter.
It’s clear that Zeldin and his backers don’t like stop/start systems. After all, they save fuel, which cuts into oil company profits, and we can’t have that, can we? But here’s the crucial thing about his proclamation. As in the UK, while stop/start systems are necessary for cars sold in the US to meet emissions standards, they’re not actually legally required as Zeldin implies. So, there are two ways you could potentially get rid of them.
1) Massively lower emissions standards such that stop/start is no longer necessary. Trump may well try to make that happen by executive order. Not that one could be implemented anyway, because only Congress has the power to enact such a change by passing new laws. 2) Legislate to specifically ban stop/start systems.
In both cases, in order to get rid of stop/start, this EPA head who sees his mission as being to get rid of regulations would have to… create new regulations. Which would almost certainly be challenged in court. And ignored by an industry that wouldn’t want the hassle and expense of removing stop/start from their cars. We could continue elaborating on how ill-conceived Zeldin’s notion is but, in sum, it’s highly unlikely to come within a giant, yawning chasm of being implemented.
Graham King is a Senior Staff Writer on the Bauer Automotive Digital Hub, working across CAR and Parkers
By Graham King
Senior Staff Writer for Parkers. Car obsessive, magazine and brochure collector, trivia mine.