Cold startability of automotive direct injection (DI) Diesel engines is frequently one of the negative features when these are compared to their closest competitor, the gasoline engine. This situation worsens with the current design trends (engine downsizing) and the emerging new Diesel combustion concepts, such as HCCI, PCCI, etc., which require low compression ratio engines. To mitigate this difficulty, pre-heating systems (glow plugs, air heating, etc.) are frequently used and their technologies have been continuously developed. For the optimum design of these systems, the determination of the threshold temperature that the gas should have in the cylinder in order to provoke the self-ignition of the fuel injected during cold starting is crucial. In this paper, a novel methodology for estimating the threshold temperature is presented. In this methodology, experimental and computational procedures are adequately combined to get a good compromise between accuracy and effort. The measurements have been used as input data and boundary conditions in 3D and OD calculations in order to obtain the thermodynamic conditions of the gas in the cylinder during cold starting. The results obtained from the study of two engine configurations -low and high compression ratio- indicate that the threshold in-cylinder temperature is a single temperature of about 415 degrees C. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.