Driving Techniques Dos and Don'ts For Automatics
 

Ok now I didn't see it here so I thought I'd start it up.Most of the techniques posted in the main thread deal with manual transmission Lancers and since it's been asked many times about "auto launching" and "shifting" through the auto trany why don't we share all our auto techniques here.
please lets keep the replys clean and stay away from the typical responce that seems to pop up..."you should have bought a manual"

auto driving techniques:

step on the gas to go faster....

shifting with an auto trans is bad. don't do it, you don't gain anything. leave it in drive.

if you don't care much about your brakes, to launch you can hold the brake down and give it gas til the torque converter is loaded. don't do this for more than about 5 seconds.

i dunno, as far as anything else? maybe some heel-toe in corners? otherwise, as one of my friends once said "if your car is automatic, you aren't driving, you're steering." sorry, but it's true. when the car does half the work for you, there's not much technique you can utilize.

Dont make me sad that i have an auto. I jus couldnt bring myself to buy a stick. I live in nyc and traffic can get really nasty. I didnt want to do that to myself, but i go to school upstate and when i go out for drives on the nice windy roads, makes me wish i had a manual tranny, hell, i wish i knew how to drive a manual.

holy geez. such a philosophy there {bored}

but then again there's not really much to do other than:

downshift when going uphill..it really helps! :lol: :headbang:

i didn't mean to bash autos. no problem with them. you do what you gotta do.

learning to drive stick isn't hard. it's practice. within a week it will be very natural. within a month it'll be second nature. to be honest, it takes more thought for me to drive an auto than a manual. i have to consciously NOT push the clutch at certain times, and it takes me a second to remember that i only need to brake. the only time i wished i had an auto was when i was stuck in deleware bumper to bumper for 3 hours, moving literally 1/2 foot every minute, or even 5 minutes. and if after that i still loved to drive my manual and wouldn't trade it in....you know it's gotta be worth it.

i think more my point was....there's not much technique when driving an auto. since shifting it is so bad for the tranny (those are there to start in higher gear in snow, or to take it out of overdrive goign down a hill, or something. not for shifting through the gears everywhere you go), there's not much you can do to control the car besides gas/brake. other techniques are the same as in a manual....just adjusted to only use your right foot:D

Well, the only thing i can say is that i have my adaptive tranny trained pretty well. Other than that.. the rest is steering. I wish there was a way to program the transmision to drive more like an manual, specifically, i wish it would downshift to higher rpm,s when breaking so the car would assist itself in slowing down.

heel toe in the turns is a good thing to learn if you live in a place where you have some nice hills and turns(like where i live :D )
the main thing when doing so is to not to apply too mush gas when doing so...that sudden burst can do more harm when exiting the turn than good.also...don't do negative drops(droping to neutral while at high speeds)it really hurts the trany.
and yes haveing a aout is only half driveing but unless you can sucessfully handle the steering and actually control what your doing is just as (if not even more) important than useing your gears to maintain proper speed and motion

so what is a heel toe?

it's a toe the size of your heel.

...


actually, it's a braking technique that is used in racing.

Also, again, since apparently this needs to be said: STOP SHIFTING YOUR AUTOS. keep it in "D" unless it's snowing out.

{blob}

heel toe is a technique (look it up for more info, here's the short version) for cornering. basically when entering a corner, you use right foot to hit both the brake (to slow down) and the gas (to get your engine revved up), so that when you exit the corner you have better weight transfer and available power. this is very effective in a manual as you can downshift to the proper exit gear, but in an auto it is useful because your car is going to be ready to launch out of the corner.

EDIT: takes lots of practice to get it right. otherwise it is just gonna be really jerky. not too good for the car either.

Is heel-toe useful in an auto?

what about left foot breaking?

I was under the opinion that the car does do this (according to my father, who has worked on cars extensively and been a car enthusiast for the past 40 yerars ) . I think the downshift is so smooth that you really don't notice...otherwise, when does it shift down from 3->2->1 so that it's in 1 when u start accelerating...say when ur rolling up to a light and it turns green..

My brother said that when you drive a manual you have to break a lot more because you're not receiving engine braking from the transmission (unless you decide to downshift w/ deceleration)

and when u drag race... don't floor the gas immediately{thumbdwn}, it's not good.... better to do is to push it about 3/4 of the whole inclination and when you felt like you're already gaining speed, slowly push it more till you hit the floor....{thumbup}

How do you drift in an automatic?? I know, its a dumb question...