I have a Honda with the floppy paddle transmission sifters. I stated using them and they seem to work great, but with no clutch and if you try and down shift it seems to put a stress on the car.Are using these things all right, is there some trick i should know about?
Just put the silly thing in drive . No need to play boy racer . And yes you will increase the wear on the transmission .
I’m not completely sure what you mean about stress. However, if you mean that the car rocks forward a bit because the lower gear engages so quickly (probably more quickly than with a manual transmission for most drivers), that’s probably normal. My car does that as well when I downshift for a steep hill.
if I’m going on an exit ramp and I want to down shift from 60 to 30 , IT’s difficult to know when to shift. I brake down to 40 and then down shift to and it goes to 4th. put you can feel the car pull to slow down. I want to put it in 5th instead of 4th but it always goes to 4th.
The car isn’t going to let you shift so early that you’d overspeed the engine or anything. The whole point of downshifting is to get, as you say, the car to pull to slow down. If you don’t want to feel that, don’t downshift.
I find most paddle/automanual shifters to be pointless unless it’s a dual clutch transmission. Which is not available on the Civic - only on its Acura version, the ILX. Normal manumatic shifters are too slow to react, and half the time the computer overrides what you want to do anyway (second gear starts on ice are not possible in many auto-trans cars with paddle shifters/sport sticks, for instance).
In short, if you’re doing it for fun, don’t worry, you won’t hurt anything. If you’re doing it because you think it’s necessary, it’s not.
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Thanks, It just felt like I was missing a gear on the down shift, it’s for fun, I miss a 5 speed stick shift.I was just worried I would damage the trans by going to the wrong gear.
If you’re using the transmission to slow the car, don’t. Ray addressed this a while back. It puts extra wear and tear on the transmission. Your car has brakes for that purpose and a brake job, when they wear out, is considerably cheaper than a new transmission.
It’s going into 4th because that is the speed that is programmed into the TCM for a downshift at the road speed and the engine’s RPMs at that point. If you were able to put it into 5th gear at 40 mph, the braking effect would be so minimal that it wouldn’t even be worthwhile to downshift for braking effect.
Thanks for the info
I’ve taken a quick look at your owner’s manual. Are you leaving the shifter in D when you do this? If so, I’d say that you’re already in 5th in that particular situation, so when you hit the paddle shifter, it’s correctly going to 4th. If you want to drive as you describe, you need to move the shifter to S, at which point you should be in 5th as a starting point, then you can shift further as needed from there.
On another note, if you’re driving in a sporty fashion, you don’t want to be downshifting on the ramp, as that can upset the balance of the car and in the worst case throw you into a spin. You want to be set up for the curve when you enter it.
Thanks this is becoming more than I needed to know. So the car is in 5th normally so if i want to pretend I have a stick, wait till I’m down to 35 and I will not have the violent jolt when I put it in 4th
If you wait until you’re down to 35, you’ll probably be in 4th. If you downshift (to 3rd), you’ll likely get a similar jolt.
I’m not sure you understand the big picture here. If you force a downshift at higher RPMs than your automatic transmission would have chosen on its own, there’s probably going to be a jolt.