FTO AUSTRALIA

i've read in car guide that its just a waste of petrol warming the car, coz new cars nowadays are design to run at start up, is it true? is FTO included in this category? i always warm my car 5-10 minutes before i run it. AM I WASTING TIME ,PETROL, AND CONTRIBUTING MORE TO GLOBAL WARMING??? HEHEHE

Hi Ed, I see you're a newbie. Welcome!

The short answer to your question is: Yes, cars should be warmed up, but "warming up" a newer car is different to warming up an older car. Rather than idling the car for 5-10 min, you should drive the car in the lower rev-ranges for 10min.

...and if you're interested, here's a longer response:

Why Warm Up
The main purpose of warming up a car is to minimise damage to the engine.

In a cold engine the various metal components shrink, leaving gaps around critical areas, one of these is the piston rings against the chamber wall. As the engine warms up the piston ring and chamber wall expand to create a seal, until this happens however, there is leakage around the sides. This leakage allows fuel and oil to mix which causes the oil to loose viscosity and the fuel to become impure, both of which increase the wear on the engine. Your engine will also be less efficient until this seal is created as with the leakage the compression will be slightly lower and with the minor contamination, the fuel won't burn as well.

Metals expand and contract at different temperatures and as today's modern engines use many different types of metal it means that different parts are warming up or cooling down at different rates. Warping can occur when different metals are expanded at different rates, therefore you want to try to warm the engine as uniformly as possible.

How to Warm Up
Quite simply you want to get your engine to operating temperature as quickly as possible, to create the seal in the pistons, but to do so at a relatively even pace to allow the metals to warm up evenly.

An engine will warm up faster under load (driving) than it will at idle, as such letting it sit in the driveway for 5-10 min is not the best way to warm up the car. It's probably a good idea to idle the car for a minute or so to get the oil temperature up a little and to let it flow through the engine, but beyond that, you are better getting the car on the road and driving in the low to moderate rev-ranges than you are leaving it in your driveway for another 5-10 min.

The FTO won't let you go over 6,500rpm if the engine is still cold, to prevent damage to the engine. But even with this limiter, I would suggest you keep most of your driving in the 2,000-4,000rpm range for around 10-15min to provide a good even warm up to the engine before you go thrashing it into the MIVEC range.

If you use the search link above, you'll also find some other info on this topic.

if my car is cold i normally turn it on and have smoke before driving it...

if my car is warm i give it about 30 seconds to start recirculating the oil before driving it...

in both instances i drive it pretty softly for the first 5-10minutes after moving off...

I donno how other fto's are, but mine is soo unpleasantly un-drivable when it is really cold.... yuk...

The manual gearbox is like completely different, 2nd is sometimes hard to engage, 1st is even harder, even at 3km/h...

Then the feeling of the power is pretty weird, like say if you are accalarating steady and shift at 3.5k, then the power is like realy not there at the start then it kinda kicks in... If you know what i mean...

Anyways, to summarize, I do warm my car up but only for about 2/3 mins in the morning, to overcome the above. Then I drive it to warm it up, and shift at around 3k till I get to normal driving temperature.

i know what you mean boris, I did a service and serviced the injectors (off the car service) and it feels a bit better now. though the throttle and gears are much more responsive when cold, a little touch and it just wants to rev if you know what i mean.
As with the gear box, i did have trobules with third, and a change of oil (reddex oil) made a huge difference, though 2nd is still a little bit hard when cold, but its find when its warmed up.
I usually start my car wait about 60 secs if its a really cold morning and then procede out of my drive way, nearly locking it up because the brakes are cold at the end of the driveway, and drive with a moderate load on the engine, but changing early ( around 3k)
Some mornings my tappets get very noisy though and my car sounds like a vw, thats when i plant my foot in 2nd to 5.3k and then change, and that gets rid of the tappets making noise for some reason.