Quote:
Originally Posted by spdrun
I had a FIAT 500 rental for the last month, since I was out West for work. Took it through a mountain pass (Berthoud) topping out at about 11k ft yesterday, and by about 8000 ft, I could smell burning transmission oil. I was mostly doing the climb in 3rd and 4th gears, running at between 3000-5000 rpm; redline is 6500 or so. Having never owned an automatic car, is transmission overheating normal for that sort of drive? In other news, the car had about 20k miles on it, and the brakes were already shimmying during extended braking, even though I was careful to use lower gears when descending from the mountains.
500 is a fun little car to drive, but I'm less impressed with the quality than I was last month.
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We experienced the same hunting problem heading up into sequoia with a 500 rental. Automatic heats way up on mountains, however, using the manual gear select it did fine, and cooled down while scaling the grade far better. I went from hating it to loving it, as the manual gear control on that automatic is simple enough that you can pick a gear and basically redline if you desire just like a real manual.
Overheating automatics on grades is not that unusual, I've done that a few times on a bunch of different products where you can smell it when the transmission is constantly shifting. Really what does it is all the shifting and hunting building major heat, especially if the speed you are going on the grade is right between a couple gear ranges, so the transmission is constantly hunting, too low in one, too high in another, with the operator alternately flooring it and backing off as the hunting continues, perpetuating the hunting.
Better to manually pick a gear and stay in it, cools right down up or down grade