Do you smoke in the morning?!

Does anyone else have this issue?
Only when the car is cold i.e. left over night, I find when pulling out of the driveway that there is a bit of smoke out of the exhaust. I do have to pull away fairly rapidly to achieve this (but not excessive revs). Its grey smoke (not white or blue). It doesn't do it after a short distance

The car is running well at the moment, and doesn't use water at all, and not much oil. Is the smoke normal for a 70k car (could it be excessive condensation due to short journeys) or am I just being a car - hypochondriac?
James

I get water vapour quite often (not plumes of white smoke), no more than other cars on the road. Could yours just be this? Remember that in perfect combustion you create a pint of water for each pint of petrol burnt. On cooler mornings you will see this as vapout until the exhaust warms up, as the cool exhaust will work as a condenser and turn some of the water vapour back partly back into water. As the exhaust warms up this doesn't happen so much, so you don't notice it.

It's also the reason why short trips are bad for exhausts, the vapour condenses in the exhast, and when mixed with the exahust gasses is very corrosive. This eats your exhaust from the insideout, where as on long trips this vapour doesn't collect as much.

If it's execise I'd worry, but other than that I think it's normal. Anyone else?

Stu

It seemed excessive this morning. But it may have just been condensation because I started the car, moved it off street into the drive and switched off. I'll get my wife to drive off next time and I'll watch to see if it evaporates or hangs around like smoke

Same again today, but it is completely gone in less than a mile. My theory is that it was always doing it, and its just the effect of more fuel going through... like having the choke out in days of old.

The car drives so perfectly, I think I will just ignore it!

This sound like a little over-fuelling to me - not uncommon.

A cold engine typically uses two to three times the normal amount of fuel as a warm one.

It's more usual to see plooms of black smoke coming from the exhaust when a warm engine has been revved hard, left to slow down naturally and then the throttle blipped lightly (i.e. no gear upchange). Typically this may also result in loud bangs from the exhaust on cars with the catalyst removed/performance exhaust.

But even when the engine is cold, it is not uncommon to see some overfuelling causing black smoke, especially at say 2-3000rpm.