2015 Jeep Cherokee - Stop start is not engaged

Start/Stop feature doesn’t work, have been told have to drive the car EVERY day in order to keep the battery fully charged in order for it to work???

Are you questioning that advice?

It needs a good, charged up battery for start stop to work. If the battery is original, I’d suggest buying a new one.

Most people post trying to figure out how to turn stop start off permanantly.

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I have a brand new battery and it still isn’t working.

If you don’t drive often enough, or far enough to fully recharge the battery after start-up, the car’s computer is reading that and won’t let the stop-start work…

If you only drive it very short trips every day, it still might not work.

Why do you want it to work? I find the feature annoying as heck, personally.

I’m curious how much the new battery cost, and did the higher co$t negate any fuel savings.

There’s a lot more that goes into deciding when to activate the start/stop mechanism than just the battery. Engine coolant temp has to be high enough to keep the heater/defroster working. High electrical loads like headlights, rear defrost, wipers, seat heaters may also prevent the engine from stopping. The catalytic converter in the exhaust system needs to retain enough heat to maintain efficiency once the engine starts again. If you live in a colder climate it wouldn’t surprise me if the start/stop does not engage during the winter months.

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If you live in a hot climate, the AC tends to keep then from stopping, too.

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You can prove conclusively that the battery charge is or isn’t the problem by charging the battery w/a battery charger overnight. If the problem remains, the battery charge situation isn’t the cause. As posted above it seems like most complaints here about this are about wanting to turn that feature off permanently. Maybe just leave good enough alone.

… and somewhere in between of this cold and this hot, start/stop system saves us all from the greenhouse gases entering atmosphere during that 30 seconds of standing on a traffic light…

this must be a miracle of technology! :slight_smile:

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Actually, the US Census Bureau estimated that the average commuter in the US spends 42 hours a year stuck (not driving) in traffic. You can figure how much is spent in energy, pollution and money having your car just idle for 42 hours. Then multiply that by the millions of cars used driving to and from work each day.

Idle time is not directly connected to stopped time.
Traffic tends to start/stop/crawl, so even if we assume 42 hours is correct (10 minutes every day?), I think it will make for only a fraction of that time where engine is stopped.
I’ve read somewhere that idle fuel consumption is in ballpark of 0.2 - 0.5 gallon per hour, so I would not expect to save more than 5 gallons of fuel per year, $13 in today prices where I live.
Start/stop system uses special starters and batteries, both substantially more expensive to buy and to replace, plus they also are likely to require more CO2 to produce.

I see some wisdom in what Native Americans say about white men and daylight savings time trick :slight_smile:https://www.pinterest.com/pin/768074911427803932/

I drive 6 miles one way to work, surface streets, and easily spend 10 minutes a day standing still at stoplights. And that’s for a short commute in a small town in Oregon.

When I lived in the Seattle area I had a friend who got a promotion and had to work in an office 33 miles from his home. After 3 months of a commute that averaged 100 minutes one-way, he had to move closer to work. I’m certain that his commute had him at a standstill for much more than 10 minutes a day.

where I live, I used to commute on the road giving me 5-7 minutes of extra time when congested, and traffic there would stop quite rarely, it was more of crawling/inching all the time, same experience on I-95 and capitol beltway

I do too. But we have been at dealerships (plural) and no one every told us why it won’t work. But if the info you just gave me is correct, why won’t it work on longer trips?

That’s a moot point, since I don’t care about savings right now.

Thanks. I don’t live in a colder climate. We have had a very hot summer, warm spring, and not very cold winter this past year. So arguments regarding cold climate don’t wash.

If you are using the AC, it might not do start-stop even on longer trips.

Plus, it IS a Jeep product… issues the dealer does not understand is pretty much how they roll. Not the most reliable products.

It is sort of unusual the number of reports we get here that the dealership can’t figure out what’s causing the customer’s problem. I can see how a diy’er or inde shop w/out all the needed Jeep diagnosis tools might fail to come up w/the cause of a problem. But a dealership can’t figure it out? On a repeated basis? You’d think a primary objective of the vehicle’s design engineers would be that problems can be easily diagnosed by a dealership shop. On the other hand we don’t always get both sides to the story, maybe that would offer a better explanation. Ray seemed to like to tease Jeep on this topic on the show as I recall.

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The dealer isn’t going to find a problem if there isn’t one.
This vehicle is not a hybrid, the engine needs to run to operate the air conditioning compressor.

I agree. Seems like the the car’s firmware is buggy, so that’s on the design engineers. The training for the dealer techs seems lacking plus buggy firmware isn’t something techs would repair but only identify.

When money gets tight, the education and training often gets the short stick.

As cars become more complicated this will only get worse.