Wow. I'll try to watch and see. There's so many damn gears I never know which one it's in anyway unless I shift it manually.

Here's a question for you, now - does your car hang in gear after you get frisky with it? I mean, even if give it a hard nudge and downshift to get around some bozo it doesn't want to go ahead and shift up ... it just holds onto the high revs for a long time like it's stuck in gear. That irritates me to no end.

.
.

Mine shows the gear position only when I'm in manual (S) mode, and even then it's not like yours ... when I shift to S, it automatically puts me in a certain gear depending on my speed. For instance, if I'm going about 45-50, it will put the tranny in 4th. Then it won't let it upshift until I do it manually with the gearshift knob (sorry, no paddles here). It WILL let it downshift automatically if I slow, and of course I can downshift manually, too.

So, basically, mine is a means of limiting the upshift to a certain gear. If I'm at a stop and toggle it down to 3, for instance, it will start out in 1st, then shift to 2nd, then to 3rd, but won't go past 3rd until I shift it manually. That's the closest thing I have to gear position readout. No "real-time" readout. Best I can do is watch the tach to know when it's in a given gear, and with 8 of 'em, that's still not scientific.

As for the over-revving, mine does it ALL the time. Any time I punch it, I've got to fiddle with the throttle to get it to settle down. I've talked to Lexus techs about this, and they just grin and/or roll their eyes ... then they say it's the "intelligent" shift logic in a sarcastic tone. It's the one thing I hate about the Lex. And btw, my IS350 did the same thing. I had it in the shop after the first day, thinking the transmission was bad, and they told me it was "normal". I drove other ones and they all did the same thing. I think it's what some people call "flaring", and the Toyota forums are full of people bitchin about it.

.
.

Weird.. I dont recall my GS really having THAT issue, however it did have a really neat distinct issue: if I was doing > 90MPH, and manually shifted into 4th (from 5th, 5 speed only) with the buttons on the steering wheel  - it would NOT come out of 4th no matter what I did. It would drop into lower gears, but never back up past 4th, unless the car was shutoff and restarted...

I was just at a huge show with a bunch of friends who are lex mechanics, i should have asked them about the issue you are mentioning. It's funny because it's completely the opposite of what IS-F owners 'want' in the way their cars drive (they think it doesnt hold gears long enough and that the pedal is too 'soft' and requires too much movement in order to get it to react).....


Helps more than nothing at all! That is interesting.. 40-41MPH is the magic mark for my car to hit 8th, so it's interesting the LS actually stays in a lower gear longer. I am guessing(!) that they made my car drop into 8th so early due to trying to keep the MPG decent (which will immediately be destroyed by the 30-35mph speed limits I will be faced with soon)...

It sounds like the LS TCU map would be more useful for me as it would hang out in 7th gear more predictably whereas my car's ONLY goal is to get into 8th gear ASAP.

Thanks for doing the check, especially since it wasn't terribly straightforward