"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
NY wrote:

Dave Liquorice wrote:
Any diesel that is/was intended to be hand startable will have one.
It'd have to operate on all cylinders to enable hand starting...

I'm always amazed that my car starts on a very cold morning when the oil
will presumably be more viscous. It sometimes takes longer to fire

I now have a stop-start car. For normal starts it uses the pinion-based
starter, once warmed up sufficiently that stop-start comes into operation,
it uses the alternator to re-start through the belt.

The stop-start takes a little getting used to (many factors that influence
whether it will or won't operate, such as aircon, steering angle, gearbox
mode, etc).

Annoyingly it's not fully predictable, e.g. you brake to a stop, the
engine stops, the hold-assist on the brakes kicks in (saving you from
having to apply the parking brake while preventing brake lights from
annoying the car behind) when you take your foot off the brake *sometimes*
the engine will restart immediately, surely it could have worked out
before stopping that it would need to restart, and not bothered stopping?

Our Honda has stop-start which can be turned off if you want. I hadn't
realised it doesn't always use the starter motor to restart - maybe that's
model-dependant, because it sounds exactly the same noise as when the car is
started on the key.

I was apprehensive at first that the car wouldn't start quickly enough when
I was ready to set off, but I've never beaten it yet: by the time I've
pressed the clutch pedal (the trigger to restart), put the car into first
gear and lifted the clutch, the engine is running and the car sets off as if
the engine has been on al the time.

The car supposedly has hill start assist, which may also work when the car
is on a gradient when it is stopped due to auto-start, but I've never tried
it. I was taught to always apply the handbrake and go into neutral when I
stop; the only time I don't is if I anticipate that I'll be starting off
again in a few seconds.

What I have noticed with this car is that there is a horrendous about of
slack in the handbrake mechanism. If I brake to a halt on a gradient, apply
the handbrake and then release the footbrake, the car lurches forwards or
backwards (depending on gradient) before coming to a very sudden stop. It
feels like a lot of play, but it may only be an inch or so of rotation. It
makes it very difficult to stop smoothly on a gradient: I find that I have
to deliberately release the footbrake slowly so the car still rolls but at
least doesn't come up hard against the end-stop. The Honda garage couldn't
understand what I was complaining about and said that this was standard with
cars that have hill-start assist. I asked what was involved in disabling
hill-start assist so the car stays where it is when you brake to a halt,
apply the handbrake and then release the footbrake, but they said the design
doesn't allow for that. They seem to have done something that has reduced
the amount of play and/or reduced the ferocity of the sudden stop at the end
of the play, but it's still nowhere near as good as my old Peugeot with no
hill-start assist.

Sometimes you can have too much automation and assistance. Automation is
fine as long as you don't have to work around it and make allowances for it
not doing what a competent manual driver would do.