spoon2000

Are there others out there who wish there was a shift pattern that was more aggressive than Drive but less aggressive than Sport? In Drive, I continually find myself wishing that I didn't have to stomp the pedal quite so hard to get a lower gear, and in Sport, I often wish that the car would choose a higher gear and not coast along with the engine revving, as if I was going to want to sprint at a moment's notice.

denvig

There's always the manual shifting option.

snagitseven

I suppose it would be nice if there was an in between setting for prescribed throttle and shift mapping (D and S are the same as Dynamic or Comfort for these two parameters), but if I want to have more gear control only, I use Manual via the paddles or shift lever. Also, I'm not entirely sure how the mappings are calculated in the ADS "Auto" mode; does it provide either Dynamic or Comfort mode depending on driving conditions or are the mapping algorithms calculated to levels somewhere in between the two?

Xtek

I find the easiest way to get around this is to give the paddle shifter a tap while in D and down shift. If I then want the transmission to take over from there I can pull down on the console shifter and it will resume D.

spoon2000

I just did a VCDS update to enable the "Race" and "Economy" settings in MMI and I'll see if those have any effect on shift thresholds.

snagitseven

Spoon, I read where someone Vagged the "Race" settings in a 3.0 and his 0-60 times went to sub 3 seconds; he now has to wear a neck brace so be careful...

spoon2000

Haha -- love it.

A buddy of mine just bought a Tesla and one of the things he talks a lot about is how owner-friendly the company is, by which he means, they are constantly pushing out new onboard software to owners and making it easy for owners to tweak their machines. I mean seriously, why in the world would Audi bury a "Race" setting in the mix unless they kind of hoped somebody would find it at some point? I wish Audi was a little more forthcoming with the "easter eggs" in their MMI, etc.

A couple of years ago there was a company called "Apex Digital" that made DVD players, and almost all their models had a hidden mode in which the machines would play DVDs from any region of the world. You could spend about 10 minutes surfing the web and figure out how it all worked. The company had "plausible deniability" about the feature, and people using their machines could fiddle and play around to their heart's content.

Too bad Audi can't channel Tesla and Apex and do something along the same lines. I suppose they're sort of doing it by feeding some info to Ross-Tech and letting them make the info public, but it would be great to do more.

snagitseven

I seriously doubt the VW-Audi Group is feeding anything whatsoever to Ross-Tech. R-T reads all the existing OBD coding on their own and provides various ways to access it. I would venture 99% of VW/Audi owners have no idea VCDS even exists. Audi would probably prefer even the 1% not get access to the OBD data in any way. I'm guessing that if there weren't some laws providing that independent shops have access to servicing cars, Audi (and other manf) would ensure that OBD data be encrypted so that only their dealers could get access to any of it. Fortunately for us enthusiasts, that hasn't happened. Yet.

spoon2000

Not sure I would agree. Ross-Tech says on some of their web pages that they have a cooperative working relationship with VAG that they don't want to spoil, and that there's some stuff they won't release because it would upset Audi.

snagitseven

Perhaps that's so but it is surprising considering the resistance on Audi's part to allow dealers to make many of the simple changes that can be done by anyone with a VCDS cable. Not to mention the many things a novice can screw up if they start making uninformed changes.