hawkeye18

With all due respect sir, bull****.

If you really think that the thoughts running through their heads during planning meetings are "we need to give the customer the best MPG we can", you are out of your mind. This 'feature' was implemented for two reasons: Avoid the gas-guzzler tax (a feat the Challenger was unable to accomplish) and give the marketers good numbers to advertise. If Ford were TRULY concerned about MPG for the customer, the parameters would not be so specific. In the Corvette, the parameters are under 30% throttle between 14-19mph. Guess what the EPA procedures are? If you guessed "first upshift pretty much exactly in the middle of those parameters", you'd be spot-on. It's a gimmick to get better advertised numbers, nothing more.

I'm not trying to be like eci saying "Ford hates customers, wants them to die", etc. but the engineers' decisions are controlled far more by marketers and managers than the customer.

Mightylerxst

Hill start assist is only available with the navigation option.
"You are on a hill" will appear on the screen!

RandyW

I disagree. If it were about improving real life fuel economy it would not kick in under such a narrow window of parameters. It's simply about fooling the test. Unfair perhaps, but GM has been doing it for a decade so Ford figures they may as well do it, too. You'd think the EPA would have wised up by now.

Rob89-94-11?

The EPA is still using a Nixon administration smog test to test 2010 cars for fuel economy. I don't think they are going to wise up anytime soon.

The skip shift is a neccessary evil. Chevy has been using it for a long time and its there is a cheap and easy fix for it out there.

I would much rather have skip shift in the new mustang than have 2.73 gears in all the cars, or have no 5.0.

Overboost

Um, not quite. They modified the testing in 2008 to reflect changing conditions:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/fe_test_schedules.shtml

It's still not perfect, but it usually gives a lower than average number for you to base on. Most people I know with 2008 or newer vehicles seem to do better than the averages on the sticker.

knk11stang

Alright guys I had to weigh in on this subject.I was a little worried about the SS feature also at first.

I don't know why anyone here wants to make a huge deal out of this.I knew this back in Feb I think it was & once I got more info the less it bothered me!

Really it's NO BIG DEAL PLEASE GET OVER IT ALREADY!!!!

Kevindust

Perhaps the ship shift can be eliminated solely with a performance tune, i.e. no hardware needed?

It'll be interesting to see what happens when Bama, Tillman, etc... get a hold of these new engines.

Knight

LOL, if you don't know how to drive a manual in the first place.

The clutch doesn't get much wear if you stick to Newtons first law. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, so if you simultaneously lift the clutch while you move your foot from brake to the gas you will have no more wear on the clutch as you would with hill assist.

Rob89-94-11?

No they are still using the same test. In the 80's and again in 08 they used a math computation to make the test more real world.

So they run the car in a lab on a dyno and then reduce the results a percentage to get the results that show up on a sticker

Rabbi Mike

NOT happy about this 1-to-4 nonsense.

I get that there're ways around it, but here's my question -- do they void the warranty??

hawkeye18

if you baleeting the skip shift somehow causes the tranny to self-destruct, then no it wouldn't be covered under warranty, but since the grand total of your modifications are going to be a jumper plug, the odds are somewhere around me doin' the horizontal bop with Michelle Trachtenberg that you'd break anything. Just sayin'.

Rabbi Mike

Your reply assumes that I know the first thing about transmission modding. Or Michelle Trachtenberg.

Bear with me. I know nothing. How do I find someone trustworthy to get rid of that awful feature, and not risk busting sh*t up?

hawkeye18

Well if Ford has any sense at all, they will have installed a system similar to the Corvette and Camaro's... a solenoid that physically locks the gate pattern out for 2nd and 3rd gear. It probably just shifts a metal plate over that guides the shifter into 4th instead of 2nd. This means that absolutely nothing is done to the transmission itself (it's all at the shifter), and there will likely be a connector for this solenoid in the center console. What you do is jumper that connector to make the ECU think it's there, but it isn't. Later iterations had the ECU checking for its presence and would throw a MIL if it didn't see it, so simple resistors wouldn't work, and a slightly more complicated workaround was required, but it still fit in a jumper plug.

So in order to defeat it, assuming the Ford system is like GM's, you would just need to open up thee center console and jumper the connector going to the shift interlock solenoid.

As far as Michelle goes...



OH GOD MY PANTS

Lou_n_Ada

Well said Torch_Vert...well said