Re: Turning overdrive off on flat highway important?
I had a Chevy S-10 (several years ago) with a stick shift. I called GM and they told me that the truck was not made for towing??
I'll never understand why any mfg. would build any truck that has no towing capability. I for one, if I didn't intend to tow anything, I'd buy a motorcycle.
I recently went looking for a new truck, wanting another Ranger I went to Ford first, but was told that the new 2.3L trucks, with a stick shift trans, have no towing rating and can't be had with any towing options. A call to Ford told me that they won't even recommend towing an aluminum jon boat. Since I won't buy the 4.0 due to past nightmares with that motor, I moved on to another brand, got the same thing from GM and Dodge on their base model trucks, either no tow rating or such a low rating it might was well be zero. I only buy American, so that pretty much ended my search for a new truck.
I've owned Explorers before, and had them for company cars. The transmission is the weakest link there, next to the 4.0L engine. The 5R55 is junk in my eyes. I had one company vehicle, driven only by me, lose the trans at 30,000 miles, 37,000, miles, 72,000 miles, and again at 104,000 miles. (The engine blew a timing chain at 40,000, and again at 90,000, it lost the distributor drive 7 times, and cracked a cylinder head three times), the rest of the truck was great, no other issues at all. This was on a truck that never towed, never saw big hills or off road, and one that was dealer serviced every 3,500 miles. They replaced it with a 5.0L model which ran flawlessly for 203,000 miles and for all I know is still on the road. The 6 cylinder Explorers had a smaller transmission than did the V8 models, from the first rendition of that transmission, it had reliability issues. The A4LD up to the many variations of the 5R55, it's still the same basic transmission. From past experience, the 4.0L for some reason has a better track record in manual trans vehicles, I suspect it had a lot to do with the added heat from the auto transmission.
In many cases, it's not the OD gear or clutches that are at fault, it's the lockup function in the torque converter. There's a thin single layer lock up clutch in many torque converters that just can't take repeated in and out operation for long, especially under heavy loads. A cooler helps some but on this type of converter, the only answer is to disengage the lockup function when towing. On some vehicles, a trailer tow or power switch will do this while still allowing OD to function.
On smaller transmissions, it's just a matter of the OD clutches simply being too small to handle the load and the added heat.
