re improvements in automatic transmissions in article qugvu ai quad wfunet wfu edu hagenjd wfu edu jeff hagen writes thanx to all those who responded particularly those never driven an xxx but here s what it s like guys ok we all know that new age at s are great in traffic and do a satisfactory job in acceleration when you keep your foot buried in the carpet my question regards downshifting not downshifting to pass at s are good at this now but manually moving the lever to or at a point where you would downshift a manual e g approaching a red light or a curve or just tooling around a parking lot in st or nd w o shifting this is why i m still a manual trans bigot the downshifting for deceleration seems so natural when i try this in an automatic the tranny doesn t seem to understand what i want addendum isn t it great after downshifting while approaching that red light when the light goes green and you re already on cam or the turbo s already spooled up zippppppppppp hagen hagenjd ac wfu edu i have a grand am with auto and quad around the gear selector there is a plastic strip which covers the space so you can t see inside anyway i took the cover off and cut the end of this long strip to a specific length the strip curls up into a cirlce at one end inside anyway by doing this the strip can t feed into the lip that circles it so i can push button pull down and the gear shifter will only go back to from drive no accidental hitting first i drive around town in to keep the revs up shift to drive above and pull down to when coming up to lights if i want if i am eating food i drive in drive there are probably aftermarket shift kits that will accomplish the same thing porsche s tip tronic automatic can be driven like an auto or put into mode tip up upshift tip down downshift of course there is an override so you don t redline the engine
