Observations on the manual mode....

[kags1969]

After 300 miles, the transmission is growing on me. Interesting observations on manual mode :

1.) You can be lope-ing along in say 4th, if you floor it (100% throttle) the car will automatically downshift for you. I am sure this is a safety feature to haul your butt out of harms way. Cool feature. It will not upshift for you, just downshift.

2.) When decellerating to a stop the car will automatically downshift for you. Cool Stuff.

Gonna keep it for sure.

[spdickey]

Creep lets you move along the 405 at "freeway speeds," or about 5 MPH during rush hour without touching the gas. Also helps while parking and in reverse, too.

Hill start assist means the car doesn't go backwards down the hill when you let off the brake. If you fail to hit the gas on a hill the car beeps to remind you after a few seconds.

[stevenvillatoro]

I, too, have gotten very fond of this transmission. Just two little things that are minor irritations in manual mode...

1. Referring to your comment about the nice feature that the transmission will downshift even in manual mode... it does not always downshift SOON enough when you decelerate for a turn, so that you may need to sometimes drop down 2-3 gears manually. That can be clumsy if you go into the turn expecting the transmission to give you '2' and you start accelerating our of the turn while it's still in '4.' I always do downshifting for turns myself when in manual mode, so that I don't have that inconvenience.

2. Since the paddle shifters rotate with the steering wheel, on many turns you have to switch to the console stick shift for downshifting. No big deal. Once you get comfortable with both methods, it's easy to switch when necessary.