Advice

Continental Car Lab | Do you still need to warm your car up?

Getting to the bottom of the myth about warming up the old banger before blazing off

11 Jun 2020 5:40 PM

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Is there truth to the rumour that you need to warm up the car engine before driving? Do you listen to your uncle on Christmas Day when he swears blind that you need to warm the car motor up every morning?

There’s truth and fallacy in the statement, and it comes down to age. Simply put, the older the car, the more there’s substance to the story of giving your engine a warm-up.

Older cars ran very simple cooling systems which simply needed more time to come up to temperature.

With a more modern car, the same doesn’t hold true, thanks to sophisticated cooling circuits that negate the need to warm up the car engine before setting off.

Watch the video for more!

WhichCar TV

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Tim Robson

Contributor

Tim dived out of mountain bike mags into the motoring space in 1999, editing and writing for numerous titles over a career that spans more than two decades.