I recently heard that remote starter kits aren't good for starters and shorten their life span greatly.

Any truth to this and if so, how much?

Mine was dealership installed almost 12 years ago and still works fine, original starter too. I am not the first owner but I did know the original owner. She bought the car new and brought it to the garage I worked at for service. in 2000 she bought a Caddy and sold me her Bonnie for $2300 and it is still well taken care of.

We've had remote starters on all our cars and never had an issue with the starters. We typically keep our cars for a very long time too.

I think you're referring to the older style remote starters. The older ones would engage the starter for a set number of seconds - 2, 3, 4, or even 5 seconds. When the weather is colder it takes longer to start the car, so they'd program it to go with the maximum. If the car is warm, the starter would stay engaged longer.

But, on the newer technology, the command center reads the voltage increase from the battery and disengages the starter (once the car starts - less voltage draw from the starter) and immediately disengages the starter.

I just wanted to make sure since I just put a remote starter on and this conversation came about as a result.

It probably depends on who installs them too. My brother had one installed on his car and he had issues afterwards. I can't recall exactly what went wrong though....

But if done right, yeah, I don't see any downsides to a remote starter. I had one on my Cutlass, factory installed for the first owner and still worked great after 10 years.

That is a big factor to it. If the installer doesnt do a clean installation taking their time to seal the connections, then they have a tendency to corrode and cause no-start problems.