"Clive" wrote in message
...
In message , Mrs Redboots
writes
What threw us totally was that these limits were *obeyed*.... presumably
why they can be higher than ours!
I'd noticed that and asked another driver why. Apparently breaking the
speed limit carries very draconian measures. A different issue but one I
found annoying was when driving an American auto box, slowly accelerating
was good but to attempt to overtake the response is to put your foot down,
each time I did I found I was without drive for about two seconds whilst
the box kicked down.

I'm not a fan of automatic gearboxes. They are generally too inclined to
change down in situations where in my car (admittedly with a diesel engine
which has oodles of low-speed torque) I'd stay in third but push down on the
accelerator. I've driven a number of automatic cars. My dad's Ford Sierra,
about 20 years ago, was OK. His Hondas were appalling: it was very difficult
to accelerate smoothly out of a roundabout without the box dropping into
first gear (well, that's what it felt like) as you applied the power - you
either got very little acceleration in third or kick-in-the-back
acceleration in first - no half-measures :-( But the worst was a Ford Focus
that I drove from Oxford to Ipswich on business a couple of years ago. There
must have been a fault with the transmission because it was very hard to
accelerate from a roundabout or to overtake anything on the motorway because
the more you pressed the accelerator, the further it would change down, so
you were in the ridiculuous situation that you want to accelerate from 50 to
70 but the only option is to keep going at 50 - any any of 4th, 3rd, 2nd or
1st gear depending on how hard you pressed the accelerator ;-) Next time
the company hired me a car, I said "manual only, please"!

I'd be interested to try one of these sequential Tiptronic gearboxes such as
the ones on the Citroen C3 and some VWs. These apparently are manual
gearboxes (with a proper clutch, none of this fluid flywheel that can creep
forward in traffic and which uses more fuel) but controlled automatically or
manually according to preference. A colleague who I used to work with said
his was fantastic. I'd also like try a Variomatic transmission (Daf, Volvo
etc).