Another thing i just noticed! (Man I love this car...)

When I take my foot off the gas pedal quickly, on any speed and any gear below 40mph-ish, the tranny seems to go back into neutral... !

It drops just a tad bit above idling, but that means I can coast really far with no extra gas (making PandG possible!... but I still do not do it I think its a little harsh on the engine).

Anyway just letting yall know.

A lot of people have discovered that, but it's not actually going into neutral. That's just normal operation of an unlocked torque converter. It's still transmitting a little bit of road power to the engine, and if you do that then put it in neutral you'll probably see the tachometer drop a little more.

For the VW transmission I have, all the transmission control module tuners (domestic and European) are working on how to extract more acceleration, holding lower gears longer, going into lower gears sooner, and such. There is still not the demand for better fuel efficiency and I can't afford the development costs for such an economy program by myself. There are somewhere around 2500 units of the 2004~2005 Passat TDI in North America, hardly a big pool in comparison to the overall number of Passat 1.8, 1.8T, 2.8 V6 and 4.0 W8 sold here from 1998 to 2006.

So...I was driving my aunt's tsx the other day and had a ton of fun with the tiptronic. Managed to average 36 mpg in it...very few stops, but still...36 mpg for 15ish miles is decent in that, especially when she gets ~26

But...then I sort of negated the potential savings by sort of locking it in second and having a little too much fun...:P

Just saying it was nice to be able to get into 5th gear a lot sooner than it would have taken for it on automatic and it paid off a bit

My wife has a 05 Jetta TDI that I rarely drive. I have told her to push the shifter to the left when the trans shifts from 5th to 4th while climbing steep long hills and to shift it back to drive at the crest. This is to prevent the trans from shifting up and down on it?s own several times before reaching the top of the hill.

Next time I drive it I am going to experiment with shifting from drive to 5th on smaller hills and try shifting it sooner during light acceleration to see if I gain any fuel economy.