Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Is revving a car engine bad for the car?


Pete Schneider
Pete Schneider, Engineering Manager (2004-present)

A lot of bad information in these responses. Ultimately, your car is constantly fighting a battle of attrition. In that sense, driving it to work is “bad" for it. Your engine began to die the first time it was turned over at the factory where it was built. The manufacturer's job then, is to build you an engine that dies as slowly as possible. You can help this process by using quality oil at proper intervals and just otherwise following the maintenance schedule in the owner's manual.
As far as whether “revving” is “bad", that depends first of all on what you mean by “revving”. If you're talking about goosing the throttle to make that vroom vroom sound, in the grand scheme of things, that's not really a substantial contributor to engine wear, though it is A contributor.
If you're bouncing off the rev limiter, as in, the pedal is flat down and you're relying on the ECU to keep the engine from self destructing, that is bad, if for no other reason than because the ECU does this by cutting fuel, which means the engine spends some amount of time spinning quickly with no fuel to lubricate the top piston ring. Not really a recipe for reliability. But as some of the other answers stated, the engine is designed to run up to the redline. The engine wears faster when it spins faster, but not on some exponential scale. If that were really a problem, the manufacturer has every ability to stop you from doing it.

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