I agree with your point about setting yourself up for early starter failure, Alex. Suppliers are aiming for a starter that will withstand about 350,000 starts over its lifetime, but that doesn't change the fact that in my mind, I'll always be waiting for the starter to conk out while I'm waiting at a light. My other concern is stopping during deceleration. I have young, rather unsure, drivers in my family who like to go in and out of the accelerator while driving. This already makes me nervous as a passenger, but that nervousness would really grow if the engine turned off every time they pulled their foot off the gas.
I keep Googling to try to find a reference to a TV segment I saw several years ago, where a guy demonstrated his technique to get very high mileage from his Corolla or whatever. It involved turning off the car at all red lights. There's one thing with start-stop that hasn't been mentioned. It's analogous to range anxiety--I'd simply call it "start/stop aniety." Going back to the guy I mentioned above, with a brand new car, you could try that yourself and not feel too worried about the car starting up quickly. (Although you'd be setting yourself up for early starter failure. The starter is not designed to be used for so many cycles. You're liable to get a failure within a year, sted of 5 years.) Anyway, so with an older car, you'd be more worried about the car not starting. My overall point is that all of these new technology require a new way of thinking about what a car is and what one's expectations are of how it works. Notably, those expectations become markedly different as a car ages and we (the owner) tries to keep it on the road at minimum expense.
I think Patton's comments at the end are the message to all engineers working on this next design challenge. While start-stop hybrids may impose real design challenges in terms of wear and tear on parts and some of the other issues Chuck highlighted, the real aim for these systems is that the consumer shouldn't know or shouldn't care that the car they're driving has any kind of stop/start technology. They will care about the value proposition of the technology--i.e., better fuel consumption, less cost, better environmentally--and that the vehicle performs as they expect. Case closed.
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