Does prolonged engine idle on a slope cause engine damage?

[GTOlover]

Originally Posted by bobman

At last !! someone who sees sense !!

Listen guys, with your 40 year old cars with old 302's, and crappy old carbs, firstly, it's a miracle if they started at all in winter, secondly, you had to let them warm up for ages before driving, or they'd bog and flump !

Modern cars have so much technology built into them, the fuel/air mixture is all carefully controlled by the ECU, which can sense the operating temperature of the engine.
It knows how cold the air is, how cold the block is, how well it's been burning so far, how cold the coolant is, and adjusts everything to suit.

Yes, granted, the oil does take longer to warm up and do it's job, so you shouldn't cane it for a while.
However, oil technology has ALSO come on in leaps and bounds in terms of protection from cold, and you might not do the same damage today as you'd have done with an old car.

The advice to idle for as long as it takes to scrape the windows is probably correct, any longer than that is unnecessary.

say you go to look at a car, and it only has 5,000 miles, but you find out that the owner had it idling for hours on end, would you still buy it ?

hey whats wrong with the 5.0 mines is EFI but it`s a great motor even if it a 40 year old design and an Iron block

[Innovator831021]

Originally Posted by GTOlover

20 minute is getting kinda long reminds me of a carb becuase they would run like crap till warm and would stall if you tried to just hop in and go after being parked over night man the old carbs had character the smell of it running rich

I don't think 10 minutes is too long. If you have easy access to the vehicle you can run out, turn it on, go back inside and finish getting ready. Or remote start if you have it. In weather below 20F, at the least it should have a few minutes to get the blood flowing. I use a block heater on my truck right now (12v Cummins), have it on a timer set for 3 hours... at our rates that's barely a dime worth of electricity. It's great though, I just hop in, fire it up and she runs like silk... not to mention I have heat blasting in only a few miles.

[willaloy]

Yeah, well, think about the schoolkids walking by all those driveways early on a cold morning. You might be toasty warm, but what are they breathing?

[thaka chatra]

I didn't read all the pages of responses, but if it takes 10-20min to warm up then the thermostat is probably stuck open or the radiator fan switch could be bad causing a closed circuit(fans stay on) resulting in constant cooling of coolant making the engine not warm up as quickly.