I have a 2015 Ford Explorer 3.5 ecoboost. I've heard you say before that idling your car accutes to X amount of mileage for each minute it idles. I've also heard you say that the most where that occurs in your engine is on start-up. After what amount of time of idling would you say equates to start up wear? I do frequent stops for work so I don't know which is better.
Starting wear is much worse than idle wear especially in the winter time. Sudden temperature change can really damage your engine head even cracking it and of course that is really not good for your engine. My suggestion to you if you are doing frequent stops for a small amount of time each then keeping your car idling will indeed improve your engine life especially in the winter as engine heads do not like sudden temperature changes and the more you keep starting it in the cold daily the weaker your engine head will get until it eventually cracks and replacing an engine head can be very time consuming and costly and that's if you do it yourself. You also may have to look into the laws in your state as the state of Colorado in which I live in it is illegal to have your engine idling for more than 5 minutes due to some emission laws.
