are current production trucks really this badly built?

I’ve been running one of these god awful automatic creations, an Endurant 12 speed, for about a year and and half now and here’s what I’ve noticed.

They suck with a heavy load. Unless you’re somewhere flatter than glass you can’t keep a steady pace on cruise because of the lag time between shifts. Newer trucks than mine have some programming BS that limit you to 53 mph in 11th gear, so you can’t even lock it in 11th anymore on 55 mph highway and cruise at 1300. These things want you lugging along at 900-1000 rpm, only to downshift again at the slightest incline that a bicyclist wouldn’t even notice, and taking so long to do it that by the time you “let the computer do its thing” you’ve lost 10 mph, more than enough time for the slow idiot in the Subaru or the Prime truck to blow your doors off and park in front of you at far less than you were originally running.

Fast red lights or having to do the tricky maneuvering the LTL guys have to do to shoehorn 48’ trailers into places they weren’t designed to go because of cheap skate idiot internet shoppers have also become quite problematic. You might have to get moving on an instant’s notice to swing out into a lane to get set up to back into somewhere since you just now got the break in traffic you were waiting for, or have been waiting through a long light cycle to make a left turn at an intersection with a short green. You’ll go to take off, but no, this thing isn’t having that. Automatic transmissions move when they feel like it, sometimes 2-4 seconds after you put hammer down.

Another related issue is the lag time between forward and reverse, which is also just wonderful when you have 2 or 3 lanes of traffic blocked while you’re trying to back into a car dealer.

For all the malarkey about computers being God’s gift to all manner of creation and being able to do any and all conceivable things in a nanosecond, I both can AND have worked a manual transmission a hell of a lot faster, more efficiently, and reliably than this newfangled idiot box, and since my previous truck only had ONE clutch replacement in 800,000 miles compared to the usual THREE by then I dare anyone to try and tell me it’s impossible.

 

Yes, nothing’s better than dumbing the job down instead of chopping off the dead wood and hiring somebody that doesn’t suck instead.