Pajero Owners Club of South Africa

Gerrit Loubser wrote:PajMan, you should be aware that your automatic GLX has very tall gearing. In fact, the gearing is so tall that it just manages to keep the torque converter locked on typical non mountainous routes at 120 km/h. The 3% larger rolling radius might not seem like much, but depending on how you typically use the vehicle, it might just tip the scales into the domain where the car runs in torque converter mode (as oposed to lock-up mode) much more of the time. This has been reported by some owners to have a significant effect on fuel consumption.

Hi Gerrit, can you explain to us newbies what torque converter mode and what lockup mode means please

Sorry Gerrit I see you have explained this beautifully on another post...

Just a quick one then, when going down a steep hill in Drive you can feel the engine sort of braking (pulling back) what is that, just down gearing? Basically stopping the car from running wild down the hill like if you were to put in neutral..

Gerard, the Pajero's INVECS II autobox has a feature called grade logic. This means that the control ECU uses data from accelerometers to determine whether the car is climbing or descending and then adapts the shift strategy to suit.

On uphills, upshifts are delayed and on downhills, upshifts are prevented and downshifts made (if deemed appropriate) to enhance engine braking.

Briefly tapping the brakes on a downhill also alerts the transmission ECU to the fact that more engine braking is desired by the driver and can prompt a downshift.

Unfortunately grade logic is disabled when the speed control is engaged.

The transmission control ECU also "learns" the driver's driving pattern and adapts shift points to favour acceleration or economy as appropriate; i.e. There are no "power" and "economy" buttons to allow the driver some control over the shift strategy, but instead the shift patterns are adapted automatically by the ECU.