How Long Does it Take to Warm Up a Car?

For those of us of a certain age, it seems reasonable to warm up your car in the winter before driving it. Warming up a car was necessary in any weather for two reasons: carburetors and motor oil. When you start a car that has a carburetor instead of modern fuel injection, the carburetor will run very fuel-rich when first started causing the engine to chock and possibly stall before the air-fuel mixture settled down and smoothed out. The manifold, quite literally, had to warm up until it was hot enough to vaporize the fuel. Until that happened, the car ran rough and spat out higher levels of pollution due to the rich fuel mixture.

Fuel injection resolved the carburetor's problems, and over time with the vast improvements to the technology, cars are ready to go seconds after the vehicle is started.

The other significant improvement is the type of oil used today. It is often said that the worst thing you can do to a car is starting it. More wear and tear is caused when a car is started since the oil has not been circulating. The oil needs to work its way through the engine parts and lubricate all of the surfaces. This is true of all cars, old and new. The difference is that today's synthetic lasts longer, maintains its integrity longer, and lubricates the surfaces it needs to protect faster than traditional motor oil.

For cars that use the old motor oil, if you do not keep up with your oil changes every few months or every few thousand miles, the time it takes for the oil to work its way through the engine gets longer, and the wear on the engine speeds up leading to more and very costly issues with the engine.

So how long should you wait between starting your car and putting it in gear? Well, for a well-maintained vehicle with no other issues, there is still the issue of letting the oil which had been sitting in the lower recesses of the engine work its way through the engine.

While some people say you do not have to wait at all and you can drive as soon as you start the car, it is still a good idea to wait at least 30 seconds to let the car settle in from the traumatic event of starting the car and letting the oil do its thing. That 30 seconds is plenty of time to wait and could be the difference between keeping your vehicle running smoothly and even slowly accelerating the wear that can lead to expensive issues down the road.