I must admit, i don’t know how ‘clever’ it is? A family member had a Mazda 3 and that was dealer bound with it playing up. When i was having my car serviced someone else was there with the same issue. I was talking to a person who had a Mazda and asked how reliable their car had been. They said the i-stop had meant it had been back to the dealer. Intrigued, i researched the i-stop on google and saw shed loads on forums. If this is so, I’m not sure how ‘clever’ they’ve done it.
As the car will use some power to run an alarm when “resting”, and then when you start the car it will use quite a bit to actually start the car. If you then only go a short distance, you are probably taking more out of the battery than you are putting back in. You need to go on a reasonable 20 minute plus (without really stopping) run to start getting the battery charged up again. You would need to do this regularly to counter the de-charging effects.
Does turning the alarm off on the fob ‘save’ a bit of battery power when the car is locked?
If you can actually turn the alarm off, then it should, but you would not necessarily want to do that, unless the car is in a safe place.
Rather than having a robustified starter to fire it back up at every junction, or using a combined alternator/starter, I believe i-start will stop the engine with a cylinder at or just past TDC. When it’s ready to start it squirts fuel in and makes a spark to restart the engine. However even without the need to crank to restart, there are still electrical processes running when the engine is stopped so it still needs a decision process and criteria to determine whether stop start is allowed to operate.
Clever might just mean it’s one of those things that works every time in theory, less often in practice.
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I have a Mazda 6 (really nice car btw) with i-stop and i-eloop and for the most part I don’t give it a second thought. It just works. I like the fact that it doesn’t waste petrol at traffic lights and in fact, when I’m sat at lights in my NB, I’m now quite conscious of the car idling and the fumes it’s emitting.
For those who might not be aware of it, the i-stop doesn’t cut the engine if the air-con is in use and set to minimum (15.0C in my 6). I think I read that in the manual. Anyway, if I set the air-con to 15.5C it functions.
It also doesn’t like a less than fully-charged battery, as I have been discovering during lockdown.
A trend which started, in my opinion, when the replaced the PRHT NC with the ND!!! 
That’s a matter of taste, but there were at least some objective improvements with the ND1 over the NC - much better mpg, and significant weight reduction. The ND2 just got heavier through the addition of mostly pointless complication.
I like the PRHT. My son’s 2010 Sport Tech is a lovely car.
This where electric cars will be better for short distance drivers compared to ICE cars.
We all know someone who drives a few metres to the shop for newspaper, fags, teabags and pint of milk everyday don’t we? My mother for one lol, except the fags…
It ruins their engines and battery life and clogs up the roads for us who want to drive our MX-5s lol.
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And all those who drive their kids to the local school rather than walking with them, or when they get old enough letting them walk themselves. After the age of 7 I NEVER had a lift to school and when I was at secondary school we lived 2 miles away and I walked it everyday in all weathers. Those journeys are not needed…
Off topic. Closed
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