wozz

We have an advanced driving course you can do here sure you have similar there. But they teach you to drive the auto manually. Reason being it teaches you to better read the road an most of the time you can pick a better gear for what the car is doing. Say going up a hill the car might keep you in 4th. But its probably better to drop to 3rd or even 2nd to not labour the engine as much.

You will find you can probably gain some MPG driving it yourself.

Why a lot of the people who have done the course and do road driving like to use a couple little digs at auto drivers who just use D. The D for ******** is the main one that comes to mind. Quite a few more.

It wont harm anything and manually shifting will give you more control over your car and those that do it usually show better observation of whats going on around them to safely select the appropriate gear.

dbspcl

I drive a stick, but this is an interesting thread - I thought the automatic shifts down through the detant cable (or whatever they use now, probably vacuum-operated) when you give it gas. Why would you want to force it into a lower or higher gear?

Also, why would you want to manually downshift when going uphill? I can understand downhill to have the engine slow you down, but why uphill (unless towing to keep it out of overdrive, but certainly that's not the case here)?

--
dbspcl
'07 GT coupe stick, tungsten-grey metallic, appearance package, interior upgrade, Eibach springs, adjustable panhard, 20" black Foose Nitrous, Roush quarter-window louvers, Steeda tri-ax, Webelectric sequentials

Orion_240

When driving along curvy roads, like certain canyons we have here in L.A., you need to be in the right gear.

If you keep it in D you have to get hard on the brakes going into the turn and then the car can bog down, because it will still be in too high a gear when you exit the turn and give it gas. What happens is that it then will downshift, after a delay (which can be shortened with a tune) and when that much power comes on suddenly things can go bad real fast!
If you downshift going into the turn it keeps the revs up and the engine in the horsepower band.

Also, when driving up a long upgrade, like on the way to Vegas, it might bog down a little if you are in D, especially if you are going the speedlimit and not 80+, when it would probably be in 4th anyway. If you're in D it can be frustrating having it go in and out of 5th (overdrive) whenever you give it gas.