Many modern cars have an auto-stop feature. When you hit the brake and the car is at a stop the engine turns off. In the car I have, the engine automatically starts again if you release the brake, turn the wheel or if the engine temperature starts to fall. To accommodate the increased frequency of starts the starter motor is (allegedly) designed to be more robust and the battery (allegedly) had higher capacity.
There is no way to permanently turn off this feature. In my car there is a button, away from all the other control buttons, that disables the auto-stop while the engine is running. If you stop the engine and restart, you have to hit the disable button again.
This annoys people so much that an enterprising person sells a device online that you can plug into the car’s OBD port that will automatically disable it for you.
This has been done in the name of reducing carbon footprint. Over five years our car has saved us 60 hours of idling, or something. In terms of greenhouse gasses is that more or less than the extra green house gasses it took to build the extra robust starter? Unknown. What about the extra pollution it costs to build the defeat device which wouldn’t have a market if the disable button was a simple ON/OFF toggle that only had to be hit once? Unknown.
Some bean counter somewhere decided that if we make it annoying enough to disable the auto-stop, it would be used by 99% of the drivers. So here we are.
I only recently noticed that GNOME has done something similar. GNOME has an option to suspend the machine if you don’t use it for X minutes. There used to be an option under the “Power” settings to disable this suspend on idle. It disappeared in GNOME. Apparently since whatever GNOME F38 uses. I thought it was there in F43 but I must have hallucinated that.
The equivalent to the OBD port defeat device is to add a configuration override that disables the suspend on idle.
In both these cases, an option has been made difficult to use on purpose to obtain a certification. In this case an energy efficiency certification.
Both of these energy saving “features” can be hazardous or making the device unsuable under some circumstances. The auto-stop, for example, if hazardous when the car is parked or stopped on a hill. It will cut out the engine at inopportune times.
In Linux, if you are logged into your machine remotely (via SSH) the machine will keep going to sleep on you, making it unsuable unless the configuration override is added.
On top of this being bad UX, I’m not convinced that these teeny-tiny “savings” make any difference at all, especially in the face of all the huge amounts of waste we have from, say private jets, AI data centers and other things.
We should be asking the ultra-rich to be making the cuts, not middle class sedan owners.
Rant out.