Curious Questions regarding Engine Wear

[mbacfp]

Assuming similar driving conditions, weather, etc. Here are my scenarios.

#1. Someone drives a total 30 miles daily, M-F, 1 cold start in the morning and 1 cold start in late afternoon everyday. Total weekly mileage of 150.

#2. Someone drives a total 150 miles in 1 day, 1 cold start in the morning and 1 cold start in the late afternoon.

So, would scenario #1 have more total engine wear than in scenario #2 over those 150 miles? Perhaps a weird question, but curious what one thinks?

 

[HemiHawk]

Seems like scenario #1 would cause most wear. More starts/stops and more warm up/cool down times.

 

[dogememe]

Yep, scenario #1 would produce far more engine wear and be harder on the oil requiring it to be changed sooner than scenario #2.

 

[SirTanon]

Without a doubt, scenario #1.

.. at least, provided the oil is good, oil level is good, coolant is there, etc.. If maintenance was ignored, oil is low, etc.. I could see a long highway drive in an oil-starved engine causing some pretty severe damage.

 

[Cujet]

Interesting question. Clearly, conventional wisdom has the start-stop multiple heat cycle situation as causing more wear.

In the aviation world, flight school aircraft engines outlast private owners by a factor of 2. Many start/stop cycles and plenty of shock cooling during training. Seems not to matter. Private owners fly long distances, with just one start per flight.

Taxi cabs and limo's also fit the "flight school" model. With plenty of starts/stops and stop-n-go driving per day, and so on. Taxi's and Limo's tend to outlast conventional use.

It must be said that in both of my examples (flight school/taxi) , the engines likely remain warm all day.

My vehicles tend to last a very long time despite my hard use and regular runs to redline. I use a quality synthetic and change regularly.

 

[CT8]

An engine has the least wear when at stablized operating temperature

 

[fdcg27]

Probably no appreciable difference between the two.
A thirty mile commute on a cold start is pretty close to ideal as would be 150 miles of driving on a cold start.
No production engine running any reasonable oil would show any measureable difference between these two scenarios.

 

[Shannow]

Typical understanding is that there's as much wear in the first 20 minutes as the next few hours of operation.

So scenario 1 should have significantly more wear than 2...however when that wear per event is immeasurable (the tests use radiotracers not measurements, as it's tiny), you will not likely see any evidence of this.

150 miles per week, 8,000 miles per year you'll never see it.

 

[Silk]

3 miles a day might be a different story, but a 15 mile trip to work will get the engine up to temp.