Dawn of the Geeks

I drive a 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander which is the first automatic I’ve ever owned that had a manual override. I recently took it on a road trip up to Idaho.

Automatic is nice because you don’t have to do anything except push down the gas to go but when you’re going through mountains it becomes a problem. If you’re trying to go 60 miles an hour through the moutains the automatic will often drop down to 3rd gear causing the engine to spin up much too fast. With the manual override I can just move the shifter over and force the engine to stay in 3rd or 4th gear.

I found that cruise control works a little different in manual mode as well. When in automatic mode the engine shifts around to maintain the speed no matter what the conditions are. In manual mode if you’re in 4th gear going up hill the speed will drop and if it drops too much cruise control turns off. You then have to drop down to 3rd gear to maintain about 3000 rpm and keep your speed modest.

One of the issues with trying to save gas using cruise control is that when you go up hill the engine works harder using more gas when the correct thing to do is to maintain the same amount of gas and let the car slow down on the way up.

Cruise control in manual seems to work that way.

Of course we were hauling so much stuff that we still ended up with worse milage than I typically get driving to and from work on the freeway.