EPA Vows To ‘Fix’ This Gas-Saving Feature That ‘Everyone Hates’

• The head of the EPA says “everyone hates” Auto Start-Stop.
• He’s vowed that the agency will “fix” it.
• How that will be executed is an unknown, but AST tech isn’t really broken to begin with.

If you’ve ever driven a gas car with Auto Start-Stop (AST) tech, you know just how annoying it can be. You roll to a stop and after a slight delay, the RPMs drop to zero until you let your foot off the brake and the engine quickly roars back to life. It shouldn’t seem like a problem, but it’s widely regarded as one of the most disliked eco features on modern gas cars. Now, the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, says he’s going to “fix” the feature because “everyone hates it.”

Here’s the thing: it might be annoying to some people, but it’s not actually broken.

Zeldin announced that the agency was looking into the feature via a post on X. He didn’t supply any real information on how the EPA was looking to solve the supposed problem, though, He just hinted that the EPA was responsible for fixing it, since the agency approved and promoted the use of AST systems to begin with.

Things get weirder when you realize that the EPA doesn’t actually mandate AST tech.

Yes, you read that right. There’s no actual federal rule that requires automakers to implement AST features in cars, but there are incentives in the form of carbon credits for automakers that do. And automakers gobbled that up as an easy win to offset emission standards. Plus, AST drives down fleet-wide average emissions, which is important to automakers. 

In a report published by the EPA in 2023, the agency noted that AST was rapidly adopted by automakers once the agency began offering carbon credits for implementation. In 2016, just 9% of cars had the tech—that ballooned to more than 60% by 2022. One could also argue that it’s pretty much industry standard at this point.

Here’s an excerpt from the now-deleted EPA paper (which has since been removed from the agency’s website):

The implementation of stop/start has been increasing rapidly, as discussed in Section 4, which aggregates and reports on these systems regardless of the regulatory eligibility for credits. In model year 2022, 60% of new vehicles qualified for and claimed this credit, resulting in a fleetwide CO2 reduction of about 2.2 g/mi. Twelve manufacturers installed stop start systems on at least half of their model year 2022 vehicles.

You may have caught an important figure above. The EPA itself shows that AST tech actually does what it’s supposed to do—it reduces tailpipe emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy even published a separate report showing real-world testing of the tech compared to cold starts and idling. Unsurprisingly, it resulted in a significant reduction of emissions.

It has also been shown to save fuel. The same report from the DoE claims that if each gas-powered car registered in the U.S. idled for 6 minutes per day, it would waste around 3 billion gallons of fuel annually (that’s around $9.9 billion, or $42.50 per licensed driver).

National Resources Canada also had similar findings with claims that AST tech cut fuel consumption by between 4% and 10% during city driving. Edmunds put this to the test using some of its long-term test cars and found that each vehicle tested managed to save at least 9% more fuel when AST was enabled in ideal conditions. One vehicle even reached 10.9% savings. SAE International even says its tests show that the feature can save up to a whopping 26.4%.

So why the backlash? Partly because drivers hate unpredictability. If we’re being real, AST can feel like an engine stall even if it restarts in milliseconds. It’s also an always-on feature by default that requires drivers to turn it off every time they turn on the car (or buy a small device to disable it; or code it out using tuning software). It makes people feel like they’ve lost control of their car, and that’s not an easy sell. Plus, consumers worry that it puts extra wear on their vehicles, even though vehicles with AST are built differently to support the feature.

AST is actually a great leap in fuel-saving tech that took off in the last decade. Hell, it might be one of the best—low cost, low tech and it’s effective. Automakers have also gotten significantly better at implementing the feature in a less intrusive way. But nevertheless, it’s still a change to the way a car works that irks drivers.

If Zeldin wants to implement a “fix” (if you can call whatever the EPA decides to do that), the best route certainly isn’t to eliminate the feature altogether. Maybe it’s to encourage OEMs to implement a memory feature or software “opt-out,” or maybe even demanding smoother, consistent execution across brands But eliminating something that shows very measurable real-world results? That’s a personal vendetta that just doesn’t make sense.