Think you're wasting gas by starting your Honda Civic 10 minutes before you go to school? Try leaving your car running for two weeks straight.
According to The Telegraph, that's what some truckers do when they take trips up to Yakutsk, Russia, a city that the publication claims is the coldest in the entire world (the highest temperature ever recorded there was −83.9F). The road you see in the photo above is nicknamed "the road of bones," a name that was given after it was built by prisoners, many of whom died during the process, under Joseph Stalin. The path is now used to bring supplies to the city, as the closest railway is 250 miles away. For fear that the vehicles will not start, trucks are left chugging along for up to 14 days, possibly longer.
So how much is wasted during a 14-day idle? According to an article done in December 2012 by TeamRunSmart.com (Freightliner), "Idling requires about a gallon of fuel per hour, so if you idle eight hours a day, this will cost you approximately $215 dollars a week. On average, idling costs $10,215 in fuel alone each year."
Obviously, that was a year ago, and fuel prices are different in Russia, but let's do the math here. According to IndexMundi, one gallon of diesel fuel in December '12 in Russia cost 94.43 rubles. Translated to USD using today's conversion rate, which has hovered around 0.03 over the past five years, that means one gallon cost $2.68. If one hour idling uses one gallon of fuel, then simply sitting in Yakutsk would would use 336 gallons of diesel. Multiply that by $2.68, and you find that a two-week stay would cost about $900 just to idle.
And that's not even counting the wear and tear on running your engine and the resulting pollution.
The funniest part is that this is only the coldest place outside of Antarctica. The real coldest place on earth is a high ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau. There are conflicting reports on the official coldest temperature (all posted on the same day), but National Geographic says -136F, NASA says 133.6F, and USA Today says 135.8F. Not that it really matters. The area AVERAGES -127F.
At those conditions, we doubt idling your car would even work.
