Charge Pump Vampire!

[R.G.]

I think these cars are already in production? Sure ive seen adverts for them? I would assume that they are designed to function efficiently in this mode, its not planned to make folks retrofit this to existing cars. I've never owned a car less that 5 years old, most older, and never sold one on, always run them into the ground so it will be quite a while before I get my hands on one of these new fangled jalopies 

Look up "how to boil a frog".

[kaycee]

With no small amount of trepidation I did

So, using technology to design for greater fuel efficiency and less emissions is somehow a bad idea and a government conspiracy? Your government must be a darn sight more capable than ours then, have you watched PMQT??

There was resistance to the phasing out of leaded petrol, now all modern cars seem to run fine on it and city centres seem to be significantly better environments for it. Cars are different to how they used to be, if it wasn't firing properly you'd lift the bonnet, check the points, distributor cap, coil etc and it would be cheap to fix. nowif it doesn't spark you have to buy a whole CPU, much more expensive, but a much rarer occurance, worth that for the convenience of a car that you know will reliably start for most of its usable life, is more fuel and emission efficient?

I dunno, maybe it will cost more in parts, or maybe you'd cover that expenditure in fuel savings?