I do a lot of highway trips and frequently merge onto the interstate and find the need to mash the throttle to get into traffic holes in the fast lane. Usually I am traveling at around 50mph when I merge (stuck behind other cars). The 50-70 time is reported by Car and Driver to be 3.0 seconds which is actually pretty slow and I must assume this is because it takes FOREVER for the tranny to kick down into the lowest gear. Does anyone, for the love of all that is holy, have any tricks to speed this up. I am always in dynamic mode, but often not in sport mode. I find that whacking the shifter over into sport, as I am starting to floor the car does not seem to speed the downshift up whatsoever. I also promise I am pushing the accelerator through the WOT button and it just seems to take so long. Anyone find a fix for this? Any Ideas?

 

Get a manual transmission.


I suspect if you used the paddles to downshift rather than the kick-down switch, it would happen more quickly.

 

My doctor told me that I needed the V8.. He did not have any reasons to back up this claim and nor do I.

 

Yikes. Don't know if the V8 could spin the tires @ 50MPH with a WOT double- or triple-downshift - you might be hitting a nanny.

 

Traction is there at 50MPH. I live in Florida and its warm and dry here. The car takes off like a rocket from 5MPH, but at 50MPH it just feels so confused and lazy.

 

I find in the V6S that single downshifts are usually snappy, but there's some hesitation with double downshifts. It probably has to figure out if it thinks it will exceed redline for the double downshift.

 

I'm always in sport mode on the onramp.. then switch over once I'm in traffic. In traffic, I use the paddles to pass if I think it needs to downshift. I believe a BIG reason modern automatics have the stick +/- and paddles is specifically for what you are describing. Getting in the right gear for passing/merging, etc..

Really surprised at the 3s time. I've never felt that, but maybe because I don't drive the same.

 

Drive it in sport mode. It helps to keep the revs up. Failing that, use the paddles. While I've never measured, I'm pretty sure that mine doesn't take 3 sec. 50 - 70, but I can't be certain because I'm too busy holding on for dear life when my foot pasted to the floorboard.

 

+1 on Sport mode with auto trans. Always at least one or two gears lower than normal mode.

 

....add me to the list of people that use sport mode for the described activity; works very well.

Dave

 

I will try to put the tranny into sport mode in those instances where I anticipate i'll to kick-down. I'll report back. I have some other ideas that I will mess with and report back if I find anything that cures what I consider this car's only flaw at the moment.

 

I typically drive in sport and dynamic when on highway. I wonder if the car learns the passing behavior as i too have short ramp situations. I find sometimes stomping on the gas the car doesn't react, but apply gas pedal aggressively but not flooring it achieves better results, but damn, you have to be careful as other drivers may not be able to react when your car takes off like an Apollo moon shot.

 

Don't have AT F-type, but a while back I had 7-series that would attempt to learn driving habits. So after SO drives it would do something like that. The only cure was to drive it ***** out for a bit so it gets used to pedal mashing again.

 

We discussed that a few years ago - should you only use Dynamic Mode when you're going to thrash it, so it doesn't learn to be sedate?