WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said Thursday that the Trump administration is ending federal pressure on carmakers to produce vehicles that turn off while idling.
“We are ending the federal government’s push to get manufacturers to install that Obama switch, the almost universally despised start-stop feature,” Zeldin said at a White House event announcing the repeal of sweeping regulations covering greenhouse gases.
Trump, speaking alongside Zeldin, said that “under the ‘endangerment finding’ [of 2009] they forced the hated start-stop feature onto American consumers, which unnecessarily shuts off a car’s engine.”
“When you stop at a red light, in other words, the engine goes off,” the president said, adding sarcastically: “That’s great.”
Zeldin’s repeal of the underlying finding, which allowed for the regulation of six greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, means that carmakers no longer have to test for or limit carbon dioxide.
Federal rules encouraging the start-stop feature were adopted in 2012 during the Obama administration. Critics argued that adding the function to cars merely allowed manufacturers to claim to have met emissions standards without actually having done so.
“[T]his feature,” the EPA said in a Thursday statement, “has proven to be nothing more than a regulatory loophole that allowed automakers to claim [greenhouse] credits without delivering real-world emission reductions or benefits to human health.”
A 2023 report by the Society of Automotive Engineers, which analyzed four vehicle models and found the duration of idling significantly impacted fuel savings, with start-stop lowering gas use by between 7.27% and 26.4%.
Edmunds, the car sales and information company, separately determined that fuel savings with the stop-start feature drop dramatically — from 9.5% to 2.9% in one test — when a car’s air conditioning is also running.
While experts debate whether the on-off switch leads to significant fuel savings, The Car Coach analyst Lauren Fix told The Post there was no such ambiguity about its popularity.
“I have not met one person who likes start/stop technology,” she said. “It also can impact your safety. It could be the difference between a small accident and a huge accident at a stop light.
“Sitting in rush hour traffic, which is very common in New York and California, all of that start and stop causes damage to the engine,” she added, “and that cost falls on the consumers.”
