Originally Posted by losiglow

When I was in high school driving a '77 Camaro, I let it warm up about 5 minutes if it were freezing outside. But with how far the technology in fuel injection and engine construction has advanced, the days of letting your car warm up in order to assure it operates correctly or causes minimal wear when driving are over. For newer cars, once you start it up it takes a few seconds to get oil where it needs to be and at that point, you're good to go. It's probably a good idea to avoid high RPMs for the first few minutes of driving just for good measure. The oil's thicker when cold and doesn't flow as well. Reving the engine while cold is probably pretty hard on the oil pump as well. But letting your car warm up for any reason than to make sure the heater is warm when you get into the car is just wasting your time. Assuming the car is post 1992 or so, it's going to run about the same (assuming it's in good mechanical condition) and incur the same amount of wear regardless of a 5 second or 10 minute warm up.