Steptronic Surprise

I had been driving my rented Fiat 500 around for a couple days. The car felt like the transmission was about to die. The RPM would redline before shifting into what felt was the correct gear. The engine did not sound good at the high RPMs.


When I drove it to school one day, I realized I could push the shifter up and down to manually change gears, even though this is an automatic transmission. Hey. I already have a manual transmission car. If I wanted this, I did not have to rent an extra vehicle.


On the day I had to return the rental, I noticed that the dashboard display showed a "D" when I brought the shifter down from park. Then when I moved the shifter to the left to be next to the "D" on the shifter, the dashboard showed "1". LOL wut?


Then I figure it out. It was a mistake to pull the shifter to the left to be next to the "D". That puts the car in steptronic or tiptronic mode. In other words, I was overriding the automatic transmission and putting the car in manual shift mode. Duh.


Too bad I figured this out on my last rental day. The car drove a whole lot better when it was in the normal automatic transmission mode. Now I know better.