Should my car feel slower with a cold engine

[Mike335i]

Engines might survive cold oil ok, but my two little turbos might give up the ghost! Turbo failure due to lack of warming up / cooling down is far more common than engine failure.

[TooMany2cvs]

Mike335i said:

Engines might survive cold oil ok, but my two little turbos might give up the ghost! Turbo failure due to lack of warming up / cooling down is far more common than engine failure.

Lack of cooling down, far more than lack of warming up. Even that's massively lower risk than it used to be, before water-cooled turbos.

Simply don't thrape the arse off it and immediately turn off.

[SuperchargedVR6]

J4CKO said:

Life is too short on you average motor to fanny about waiting for oil temps,

Indeed. I wonder if the people who wait for their oil to warm up still wait for their LCD TV to warm up before changing the channel?

I bet said folk don't consider warming up their tyres before throwing the car hard into a corner. Just as long as the oil has reached an arbitrary number they are comfortable with, that's all that matters.

[J4CKO]

Mike335i said:

Engines might survive cold oil ok, but my two little turbos might give up the ghost! Turbo failure due to lack of warming up / cooling down is far more common than engine failure.

They usually do anyway on 335i's, and the HPFP, plus other bits, great engines but they do have some Achilles heels and you buy one and no matter how you treat it, it screws you over anyway even if you baby it.

The problem isnt generally the 5k you have done in a car, like mine, its how the muppet who had it for the other 110,000 did things, luckily, mines previous owner was familiar with the concept of oil changes, so far so good, unlike the fkwit who had my Fiat Coupe before me and ran it short of oil so it used more oil than petrol, I babied it but even at 47,000 miles it was done for.

Bit of a moot point the oil grade, temperature, quality, change frequency, type etc if some pillock couldnt pop the bonnet and check it once every few months, then ruins it and quickly part exes it, there is a special place in hell, between Beelsibubs balls for them,

[Funk]

caelite said:

I love that my car has both a coolant temp and an oil temp gauge. It seems really rare on 'modern' cars. I'm pretty anal about not thrashing my car when the oil cool. Accidentally done it the other week when I saw a work colleague pass me on my commute almost immediately outside my house. The ensuing 100mph chase through empty 6:30AM streets on a stone cold engine probably didn't do my motor the world of good. Nor did it do my ego any good when I saw my colleague's chavved up, rough running VAG hatch outdrag me past 80-90mph or so... . I'm now blaming that on the 'cold engine' though! He had been driving for a good 5 miles or so before he passed my house!

Edited by caelite on Saturday 4th February 20:04

That's the coolest story I've ever read.

[SuperchargedVR6]

J4CKO said:

Mike335i said:

Engines might survive cold oil ok, but my two little turbos might give up the ghost! Turbo failure due to lack of warming up / cooling down is far more common than engine failure.

They usually do anyway on 335i's, and the HPFP, plus other bits, great engines but they do have some Achilles heels and you buy one and no matter how you treat it, it screws you over anyway even if you baby it.

Premature turbo failure is more common in remapped cars. It's the same story in VAG TFSI land. I reckon bog standard 335i and GTIs are pretty rare now. I've followed quite a few older 335is recently that kick out tonnes of blue and black smoke when booting it. Knackered turbos and obviously remapped judging by the sooty bumper.

[hman]

M1C said:

hman said:

Pan Pan Pan said:

Even at the motorway speed limit, my diesel Passat is still turning at less than 2000 rpm, and for non motorway driving it can take up to 20 to 30 minutes for the cooling system to reach normal operating temperature,


Surprisingly after just half a mile or so, the heating system `can' put out warm air, but with the exception of the screen clearing setting.

Sounds to me like your thermostat is not closing properly at low temps...

I think this might be a 'thing' on Passats. A mate (a fellow PHer) had a Passat which i think did the very same thing.

we have a 2008 2.0 tdi passat in our household - it takes about 3 minutes (1.5 miles) of cross town driving to start registering and about 5 minutes to reach 90c.. slightly longer in winter but not much.

[Red 5]

Mave said:

Red 5 said:

As an experiment, if you'd like to heat an engine up really quickly, you would drive a laden vehicle at the maximum sensible revs for the cold engine in 1st gear, up a hill.

A horrible thing to do yes. Adding mass as ballast, adding further load due to incline,

I think the point was, it's load on the engine (in terms of how much power it is making) that warms an engine up. In your examples, you're citing ways to increase the power demand on the engine- and I expect that if the engine can pull max revs up the hill in first, then you'll actually warm it up quicker in second because you'll be able to keep the throttle wide open and make more power.

Well yes, the load is what I was getting at fundamentally

More power does indeed = more load, but comes with greater speed and cooling over the rads. Then we'd be talking about efficiency of cooling systems on cirtain engines yes?

I know that this can be taken to extremes, to make the point....
5 mins flat out in top gear won't tend to overheat an engine.
5 mins at high revs in first gear often will

So even though less load is being applied, the systems designed to remove heat, are just not efficient at such slow speeds.

[Pan Pan Pan]

hman said:

M1C said:

hman said:

Pan Pan Pan said:

Even at the motorway speed limit, my diesel Passat is still turning at less than 2000 rpm, and for non motorway driving it can take up to 20 to 30 minutes for the cooling system to reach normal operating temperature,


Surprisingly after just half a mile or so, the heating system `can' put out warm air, but with the exception of the screen clearing setting.

Sounds to me like your thermostat is not closing properly at low temps...

I think this might be a 'thing' on Passats. A mate (a fellow PHer) had a Passat which i think did the very same thing.

we have a 2008 2.0 tdi passat in our household - it takes about 3 minutes (1.5 miles) of cross town driving to start registering and about 5 minutes to reach 90c.. slightly longer in winter but not much.

When driving in winter in town, or on B roads, engine revs are typically around 1000 to 1500 rpm owing to the traffic/lower speed limits typically found on these roads. It is only on motorways, at the motorway limit, that I can get the revs up to around 1900-2000. Consequently when travelling relatively slowly in very cold conditions it can take up to 20, 30 minutes for the cooling system to fully warm up. I could of course just hold the lower gears for longer, avoiding top, to warm the engine up quicker, but this seems wrong somehow, especially with all the hooha about diesel emissions these days. The oil temp, takes a lot longer to reach its normal operating range.

[EazyDuz]

You wouldn't roll out of bed and start sprinting would you? So why would you start a cold car and drive it hard. Things need time to loosen up.