Auto selecting too high gear driving me mad

[johnsoncp]

This is a characteristic common to all of the 2 litre petrol autos. Our XE behaves the same. Stamp on the accelerator pedal and it hesitates briefly whilst it works out the selection of the lowest gear and then takes off like a scalded cat. After a while you adjust to it and anticipate the reaction. I think we've both adopted a progressive throttle action where you gradually increase pushing the pedal down, so that when it launches and doesn't get the kick down, after which the throttle is increased to full. It's sort of become second nature now. Lots posted on this topic over on the XE forum.

I also had a 2 litre XE and you have described the behaviour perfectly. I assumed that as the F-Type is the sports model, they would do away with this economy nonsense. For example it doesn't have an ECO mode. Unfortunately when I test drove it the roads were all fast dual carriageway and no town driving. Having said that the demonstrators are thrashed so it would probably not do it anyway.

[johnsoncp]

My friend is driving an Audi S1 today. A high spec 2 litre auto. He said as soon as you start moving it goes up to 7th gear as soon as it can so it's difficult to drive. As a result he is having to use sports mode. Looks like all the manufactures may be doing the same thing?

[scm]

Well, they're all under same pressure to meet the latest regulations ....

[Dan_Veluwe]

This problem does not occur with hybrids. They assist [or full EV] at low speed, no need to switch up to high gear.

[Arne]

It is the same on my daily - a VW Arteon with a 2.0 tsi 280 bp engine and DSG (dual clutch) gearbox.

It is a rather quick car for it's size (0-100 kmh in 5.6 sec), but you need to put it is sportsmode for the gear to stay in the "sweet spot". Otherwise it will to quick shift to a too high gear.