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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GaryM" data-source="post: 31978" data-attributes="member: 9373"><p>Unlike a typical acceleration procedure where you accelerate to road speed, back off the throttle and the trans will shift to it's highest gear, the Equinox will not do that once you're past 62 mph. It will remain in 7th gear, which at 70 mph is 2200 rpm. 8th gear is 1800 @ 70 mph. What I do is accelerate to 58 mph, back off and let it shift to 7th, then slowly accelerate to around 61-62, completely back off the throttle. It will shift to 8th every time. Then slowly accelerate to road speed. The catch here is if you try to accelerate too fast it will down shift to 7th, which means that's where you'll stay. The TCM is programmed not to enter 8th gear while accelerating through the lower gears and definitely will not shift to 8th if road speed is above 62 mph, and throttle % is more than 0. Once in 8th with will remain there until you either accelerate too fast to pass or slow down to a point it downshifts when you're picking up speed again. Either one of those actions will put it back in 7th and it will stay there. This approach may save some fuel since you're never really racing the engine as you merge into traffic, but because you're entering much slower than surrounding traffic you may get some nasty stares from other drivers. I live in a rural area so there's not a lot of traffic but in town (Green Bay) you have to pick your spot. You can always force it using the paddle shift, but to me, that kind of defeats the purpose of an automatic transmission. Using the above technique I'm getting 8th gear 90% or more of the time. Hope that helps.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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