Shift Problems
 

My car is a 2000 A6 with automatic. When slowing down, especially for a turn (but also occurs at times when going straight), the car seems to have a hard time figuring out what gear to go in, and will be in neutral (or between gears) for too long. If I press the gas immediately it will rev up before catching, so I always have to "baby" it when I slow down and make a turn. This normally occurs in a case where second gear is what the system should choose.

If I push the shifter to the right (manual mode) and use the + / - to select gear myself, it never happens. So it seems to me the actual transmission is ok, but the process by which the CPU selects and engages the gear is faulty.

Starting off from a dead stop the car works fine through every gear, the problem only occurs when slowing down (to about 15 or 20 mph) and then speeding up from there.

Any suggestions?

I believe what you are describing is pretty common.

For me, when I am NOT making a complete stop at a stop sign and then get back on the gas, it hesitates to move, its like the car didn't get the gas peddle input and I just kinda sit there for a second, then the car jerks and takes off. If I am slow to get back on the gas the issue doesn't happen. My car does not rev like being in N though. From what I understand the problem to be, since our cars downshift while slowing down, the transmission has shifted into 1st, and the transmission side of the torque converter is going quite fast, and the engine side is going slower. You give it gas, but the engine is going to slow to apply hydraulic pressure to the faster moving torque converter, so there is a delay while the engine speeds up to match or exceed the torque converter speed.

I don't know how to describe this. It has to do with stall speeds, our cars have very short 1st gears. All auto transmissions have this problem, but since our 1st gear is so short, it is more noticeable to our cars. Our 3 series with the same transmission does the same thing. Hopefully someone better at describing things can explain this.

My car definitely revs, and this morning I did some tests on the way to work, and I can see in 1st gear at around 20+ mph I am about to hit 4,000 RPMs, so it possible that my car is downshifting to 1st, making me have to rev more just to get to the engine to match the speed of the transmission. I guess in this case the question will be, what is making the car select 1st gear instead of 2nd gear? If I have a bad sensor, or if the computer needs to be reflashed or something, I'd like to try and get it taken care of.