First of all, thanks for all the responses to my previous post.

I am doing an overnight test drive on a G35 sedan (Sport, Aero, Premium). I have only driven it for about an hour and I am in love. I did notice something odd, and maybe this is just a feature of tiptronics in general. No matter what gear the car is in, when I shift it over into tiptronic mode, it always goes to 4th gear, even when the car is stopped. This is less than useful if I want to shift over from auto and downshift quickly. Does anyone know why it does this?

Thanks in advance.

 

It stands to reason that the only gear it possibly could go into is 4 and then you can shift it down or up depending on what you want to do. Any gear lower than four during the throw-over would over rev the engine, especially if you are at highway speeds.

 

Thanks for the response. I understand your point, but does it make sense for it to do this when the car is stopped also?

 

Yeah -- Its sort of like thinking the DEFAULT gear for tiptronic is 4th... but you can change it at any time

 

The thing you have to understand is that on the sedan it's not a true tiptronic. When the manumatic says 4, what that really means is that the ECM is free to choose any gear up to 4, but also including 1,2,3 as appropriate. So if you're stopped with the manumatic in 4th, it will still use 1st gear when you start moving. It just won't shift beyond 4th gear into 5th.

Seems kinda screwy to me, but I guess the reasoning behind it is that on the sedan the manumatic will primarily be used for passing at highway speeds, and there's probably some truth to that assumption. Still, I think the best thing would be if it automatically went into whatever the current gear was, or better yet, what I'd really like is for it to be a true gear-select manumatic similar to the coupe.

Jeff Kohn
H-Town, TX
2003.5 Automatic Sedan, Desert Platinum/Willow, Premium, Nav, Tint

 

I find it kind of funny that a Dodge Intrepid has a more sport oriented manumatic than a G35 Sedan... that was my last car... if the car was in 2nd and you dropped it into manumatic you were in 2nd... if you were at a light and put it in 2nd you started off in 2nd. I never used this to race but I did use it in the snow quite frequently. Also when you were in manumatic the car shifted harder. In the G35 it actually seems to shift softer. It also seems to take a long time to shift. The Dodge shifted instantly and hard when in manumatic.

This is one thing that is a big disappointment with the G.

2003.5 5AT Sedan Black/Black Premium/Winter Packages

 

I decided to run in the sport shift mode for the tank of gas in my Sedan right now. A couple of observations: MPG suffers to the tune of 2-4 mpg (I am not driving any more aggressive save for using a 4k shift point) in auto I get approx 20, when using sport shift the "feul economy" info in my Nav sys shows between 16-18mpg; I notice the intuitive nature of the ECM for accelerator application vs. shift points still exists in sport shift ie. if I run to redline in say first then shift from 2-3 at 4k (still using hard excelleration) the actual shift takes place at redline.

Side bar...thanks to the administrators for all your work to keep the list going. You do a great job. Miss the sedan on the G35 driver logo tho! ;^D