Originally Posted by TunerMax

Well, the cold is a bit of a different situation, but not by much.
Below -15 Celcius (around 7 Farenheit), I'd for sure recommend letting hte engine warm for about a min or two. But that's pretty cold temps, and even this could be argued. More than a minute or two is not really necessary though.

Also, when running those temps you should be running 0w-30 oil, or somehwere there abouts, as such, the oil won't play into the discussion so much. Also, your oil pump turns in direct relation to engine speed. And the oil will flow better when you're not at idle, pretty much everything in the car works better when the car is under slight load and maintaining under 2-3k RPM revs until warm. Idling warms the car up slower, warms the oil slower, circulates the oil slower, etc, etc. So the longer you idle, the worse it is, period.

And any temps lower than that you should be using a block heater and/or electric blanket if you really give a crap about your car.

A few decent quotes that apply to this I've included below.
You'll note a lot of guys will recommend longer idle times in below freezing temps, this isn't really due to oil, but due to excessively cold block/piston, etc temps. The colder they are the longer they take to warm up to temp, and the colder they are the smaller they are, which means more wear on the engine, this is why you want to keep RPM down until the block has a minute or so to get to a reasonable tolerance.

Again though, more than a couple minutes is un-necessary and only more harmful, and this is ONLY in below-freezing temps. All other situations, just get in a drive slow until the car warms up

Originally Posted by bigjee

Pretty sure you're reducing the life of your engine if you're only warming it up for a miute or two at -15C.


experience is a good teacher.