Why you shouldn’t turn off the engine when parking after a long drive

The car is a machine perfected over more than a century. And like any high-tech machine, it needs love.

It may be a staple item, but at the rate we’re going, it’s becoming a luxury item. And we can’t afford that the car has a breakdown or its life cycle is shortened, because we treat it badly.

The vehicles have a way of use that is perfectly detailed in the manual. doWho drives according to the manual? Almost nobody. Especially in aspects that have to do with losing 1 or 2 minutes of time.

Treating the car well is important at all times, but even more so when long trips are made. On these routes, the engine and critical components such as the turbo suffer especially.

As our colleague Aarón Pérez explains to us at Auto Bildforever You have to give the engine time to warm up when you start. You have to respect the times.

When starting, do not go up a lot of revolutions and accelerate progressively to let the engine increase those degrees necessary to prevent premature wear of the internal parts of the block. It also helps the coolant to circulate through the circuit and all the metals to expand and couple before demanding a greater workload from the engine.

The same principle applies when we arrive at the destination and stop the car, especially on long trips. You have to give the engine time, and especially the turbo, if your car has one, to cool down before turning it off.

The turbocharger gains a lot of temperature and if you don’t wait for it to cool you run the risk of the bearings suffering and end up leading to an expensive breakdown.

For this reason, after a long journey, allow a few seconds (approximately a minute) the engine to idlethis way you will help the turbo lower the temperature and you will prolong its useful life.

It is worth losing that minute, rather than suffer a break and have to leave a good wad of bills in the workshop.