while it's on my mind i'll ask it.

i'm going to the beautiful mountains of north carolina next week. i'm really excited about showing off my new car, but have a few worries about getting up the mountains.

my xA doesn't have as much pickup as my 4-cylinder grand am. with that car i was able to get up the slopes fine with no trouble, but sometimes i have trouble getting up hills in nashville (at least without flooring it and revving the engine).

in my mom's old chevy caprice we had to shift to a lower gear (all our cars are autos) to get up the mountain - will that help me get up better in the xA? if so, which gear would be best to switch it to?

thanks.

(and if you haven't figured it out yet, the only thing i know about cars is how to take pictures of them and how cute mine is...and how to press the gas pedal and turn the wheel)

 

With a heavily loaded car at high altitude (Colorado, not those eastern "bumps" :-) the car will downshift into 3rd on steep grades, but didn't require full-throttle to maintain 65. There is a hill sensor built into the computer to keep the tranny from shifting into and out of overdrive on steep grades, but we found with most freeway grades, it would still shift back and forth. For this case I just thumbed the overdrive to off until the top of the hill.

If you're driving on such a steep hill that the engine drops to second (say 4000 rpm @ ~ 30mph) and back to 3rd, then shift the lever to 2nd.

From reading plenty of tech-types here, there should be no problems with the engine at high rpms. You'll just use more gas. If you're going down as much as up, the trip mpg should average out.

For what it's worth, we saw our best mpg at high altitude - the car has less available acceleration, but it's pushing through much thinner air.

 

interesting...so pretty much just keep an eye on the RPM going up and switch to no overdrive if it gets too high at low speeds?

 

The only reason to take it out of (over)Drive when climbing is if it keeps shifting back and forth between gears. Also, thumb off the OD or downshift if you coast too fast downhill. This keeps your brakes healthy.

 

I usually turn overdrive off everytime I drive up a bigger hill/mountain. I'd rather keep my momentum going than having to deal with the constant up and down shifting overdrive does. But besides that, I have never bothered shifting into the lower gears.

 

Thats why the lower gears are there. As PupSocket said--if it starts lugging or shifting down--drop it a gear.