Stop and Go City Traffic

[maxim809]

Hi everyone. I have been happily driving a 2010 LX model Insight for almost 6 months and I currently have 23k miles on it. About 95% of those miles are California highway miles and I was hoping to get some ideas of how others drive in the city because I am not as experienced in that aspect as some of you might be.

So here is my dilemma -- as you all know the Insight admittedly has a clumsy Auto-stop system. When I drive in the city and approach a stale red light there are times when I need to come to a full stop but then the light immediately turns green so I have to begin accelerating.
This means I activate auto-stop for a split second and then I have to force the gas engine to turn back on immediately afterwards. To me, this seems like unnecessary wear-and-tear on the engine but honestly I am unsure how the mechanics of the auto-stop feature works so I can't tell if this is truly bad for the car or not (intuition is telling me it isn't.)

Recently, if I predict I am going to be in this red-to-green light situation, I shift to second gear right before the traffic signal so that I prevent auto-stop from triggering and it makes for a smoother ride, and then I immediately shift back to D once I start moving again. However, I have heard a long time ago that continuously shifting gears in an AT (but I guess the Insight is CVT) is bad for the transmission so I don't know if I am solving one problem with an even bigger problem.

I know this post is long so here are my abridged questions:

- Is my method of shifting gears to avoid auto-stop from happening at unwanted times okay for the car, or is that a bigger issue than coming in and out of auto-stop rapidly?
- Is there a better way of dealing with this situation that I am unaware of? Not sure how helpful the EX paddle shifters are but I drive an LX so I have to work with what I have.

My ultimate goal is to drive my car with the minimal amount of unnecessary wear and tear because reliability is a top concern for me. Any thoughts? Even if you don't know the answer I'm hoping for some input to help generate some ideas.

[carniver]

Turning on windshield defroster is another method for disabling auto-stop.

Best method is still to coast to stop, hoping you didn't actually have to stop.

[maxim809]

Hm, maybe I am uninformed or doing it incorrectly, but when I turn on windshield defrosters there are times when auto-stop still kicks in if only for 30 seconds. I read on this forum in the past that the reason auto-stop only lasts for a short time is because of the way how the humidity sensor works with auto-stop. Nonetheless, it seems to me that auto-stop still happens with defrosters on?

But to be fair I should go try it and report my findings before I make any claims.

In a perfect world I would always favor coasting and hoping. In fact, there are times this works great for me. But in certain regions of daytime city traffic this isn't a safe option so I'm hoping to find a compromise.

[carniver]

It's the lower left button from the climate control circle. If you press that button while braking, the windshield blowers will slowly start to blow very hard, and auto-stop will definitely not engage. You may then turn it off, as long as you didn't let go of the brakes the car remembers that you wanted windshield defrosting and will not auto-stop.

[maxim809]

I just tried out the method you described during lunch and it worked great. This is exactly what I have been looking for and I'll definitely be using it to micromanage the auto-stop feature. Looks like my initial assumptions and understanding of the defroster were incorrect. Thanks!

[Jayemtee]

Letting the autostop work as advertised is MUCH LESS wear and tear than sending high current to the blower motor. And then there's the issue of robbing power that will have to be paid back through the gas engine.

I honestly don't care how you drive your car, but your first idea was wrong and the solution doesn't help the car or the gas mileage.

[maxim809]

Well, I'm hoping to get suggestions on what the best method for dealing with this issue is so that I can make an informed decision on how I should be driving my car.

If turning on the defroster is an even worse idea than letting the auto-stop feature kick in and out, then it seems like the best solution is to just drive normally from what you're saying? The definition for driving normally in this case is to refrain from fiddling with the transmission as well as the defroster for the sole purpose of preventing auto-stop from triggering, and instead to just let auto-stop do its thing when it needs to.

I think the biggest mystery for me is that I'm not sure what's going on during the process of turning the gas engine back on from an auto-stop state.

[Jayemtee]

Don't worry, the thinking has been done. Your creative mind is coming up with issues that don't exist. Don't complicate them with creative solutions.

[carniver]

Originally Posted by Jayemtee

Letting the autostop work as advertised is MUCH LESS wear and tear than sending high current to the blower motor.

That's true. For me it's just that I need to use the defroster every now and then to remove frost; but otherwise, I also think it's better to let auto-stop engage. In fact, I wish auto-stop would engage more and longer

[maxim809]

Hmm, sorry, but your replies are a bit too ambiguous for me. I guess I'm a little unsatisfied with the high current to fan motors vs auto-stop comment because at this point I still don't understand how the engine shuts off and turns back on so without a frame of reference I can't begin to understand how you can compare the two in terms of wear and tear. I suppose this becomes the problem of comparing apples to oranges so it's difficult to gauge which is actually worse.

The more I think about it, I suppose it's too difficult for anybody to answer my questions unless the person is an engineer at Honda who designed, created, and tested the auto-stop system so I guess it was my mistake to ask a question like this in the first place. I don't think it's fair to write off the problem as not existing, because instinctively, mechanical and electrical system experiences wear and tear when turning on and off. I guess I was just hoping someone might know something.