Automated Tranny Pros and Cons

Was trying to be good natured, so moving on, be well dude...

 

I ran a 2001 century, broke it's virgin cherry at 20 miles and turned it in 9 months later at 220K on it.

It had a Meritor Auto combined with a 500 Detroit. It was tuned close enough by those who built so that when it's time to shift up or down my hand is reaching for the manual stick that is not present while the truck proceeds to execute the shift.

There is two things.

1- Anything requiring precision, such as coming into a scale house at 30 or whatever posted speed required by the scales system to make everything work for example... it's in manual mode.

2- We were a reefer team. We never stopped except every 30 hours to fuel to the brim and to load/unload. Even then the engine is running to support cooking electricity burn (Which otherwise would be wasted in the truckstop which is not welcome in our Fleet at the time because Teams like ours were fire rescue teams chasing after lazy soon to be fired single drivers and attempt to save the account that is threatening to fire our collective #####.

The never stopping part created a problem in which the Transmission over flowed it's Buffer for software and it would brick itself. The Term Bricking comes from IT when a router fails to accept any commands at all and sits there like a brick or paperweight. Ergo Bricked. Dead. Glasgow coma scale of 0. (I had a value of 8 once for a few hours not too many systems in my mind and body was working that afternoon while they carted me to Parkland)

Anyway a bricked transmission under a load requires a heavy wrecker Tow.

Twice. FFE paid for same. FFE Sent the vice president of Operations once to our truck and eyeball us to make double sure it's really and truly bricked over in Forth Worth one Wednesday night. We had a pile of laundry waiting to be sorted in the passenger seat, this offended him and he told us so with a couple bad words...

We told him, give us a chance. A freaking chance to sit and rest a day and will have the whole #### rig disinfected and hospital certified clean. That's the problem with you Officers and Dispatchers... always demanding and never being satisfied. And now you ##### about our Laundry for which we do not have any TIME AT ALL TO DO? WTF? is this? /rant.

He became sorry.

Something improved because weekly we had a few hours to a day to knock off and bobtail to wherever we pleased. (And did...) anywhere in the USA.

 

Or, you could realize that not all AMTs are created equal. Some of them, even brand new ones, just plain awful suck. They shift hard, they refuse to allow for smooth motion when doing things like moving slowly through rough terrain or backing under a trailer.

Yes, the tech may be there for a transmission that can outperform any driver, but the fact is that there are still AMTs on the market today that just plain ol suck, and if you choose to insult a driver for having issues with the part of the driving experience that he can not possibly control then you may not be the brightest one out there.

 

Ok, but 99% of the opinions on here about them, come from people who IF THEY ACTUALLY did, drove the 1st or 2nd gen trucks, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in '99.'00 or '01. I will agree those 1st and 2nd gen. trans. had issues, hell I drove one for 8yr and 978K, I can fully demonstrate the issues, my boss and I can R&R shift motors in 20 minutes, 15 if pushed. That doesn't mean I don't still like them, and yes, I can drive a manual, 9spd, 10 spd and 13 spd. Eaton/Fuller has stopped making the autoshift, but, it's final variant was in it's 10th generation. My '15 Mack has the 3rd gen. of M-Drive, the Mack that I demo'd, and recounted the demo. exp. in the forums, had a 1st gen. M-Drive. Now, keep in mind, that M-Drive Mack and I-Shift Volvo that in the US we are running the 4 th gen. of, is actually the 11th gen. because they've been using it Europe. All they've done is retune it for US operations. BTW, Mack and Volvo, now require manual trans trucks to be special orders, otherwise they come standard with M-Drive or I-Shift. PACCAR is slowly moving that way.

 

I drove a cascadia with a Detroit and automatic. You'd have to double my pay for me to take it again.

 

Why tell us more please?

 

Well, I believe it's due to tuning. Because mine was setup for economy, it would skip as much as 4 gears at a time. You'd start in 2nd and go to 6th, then 9th, then 12th. It took so long to get to rolling speed I honestly thought it was a safety hazard. And if you down shifted, it would just up shift its self as soon as you hit the throttle. It's not like a car, where you press down the throttle and it down shifts, this thing up shifts to 12th at 35mph.

 

Yeah I an lucky my company works with us on the setup, what you are describing would drive me crazy too

 

I could see progress in it, and they do get crazy MpG. Mine got 10.5. But idk if it's worth the head ache. Personally I think I'd eat a mpg for a little more pickup. Especially in traffic