In addition to this, the 4-cylinder would burn close to .75 gph when started for the first time on a cold day. I imagine the V6 was probably at twice that amount. So warming your car when it's cold outside does use much more gas, but not enough to make it expensive for most people. One and a half gph, for example, at 5 minutes of warming per day would be 100 minutes over a month of work, which would still be less than 3 gallons, which would be less than $12 extra in gas per month. Most folks are fine with that.
Except that it should make a difference! When real numbers are used, as follows:
In
an experiment on a 1L car engine a bunch of data was produced.
I graphed it to get the average burn per minute up to the 17 minutes. This data set was collected with an external temperature of -7C (19F). The numbers below would go up fairly dramatically in our normal -15 - 20C mornings...
Bottom line0.2L burned to warm up engine (17 minutes required)
In clown culture winters - this is repeated 2x per day every day. Anecdotally, in Ottawa, I see this start to occur in November - March (5 months).
so, 150 days x 0.4L = 60L of fuel for the luxury of warmth in a 1L engine car!! This translates to a cost of 60X1.25/L = $75 and a carbon footprint of 60L x 2.5kg/L = 150KG of CO2.
While obviously the folks who do this are "Fine with that"....Mustachians must not be!!
I would hazard a guess that those 6 and 8 cylinder engines that are everywhere would push these numbers up much higher.