Manually Change Gears on Some Automatic Transmissions ERS System Explained

Holy moly. Okay, friends, so in this video, I wanna talk about your vehicle's ERS system. Essentially, what I mean by that is your electronic range selection system. This is only gonna be available in automatic transmissions. Let's talk about it. Now, your ERS system is an abbreviation for your electronic range selector system. Essentially, this is gonna be for automatic transmissions only, and it's only on some makes and models of different types of vehicles. The way that you're gonna be able to tell if you have an ERS system inside your particular automobile is if you were to look at the gear selector area or even on the steering wheel. If you see something that has a plus or minus and it doesn't have to do with your cruise control, more than likely, you have an ERS system. And essentially, what these buttons are here for is to give you a little bit more control over the functionality and shiftability of your transmission. Now, why would somebody wanna use this ERS system? Well, maybe you're driving down the highway with your pickup truck and you're towing something that's fairly heavy and you happen to see that there's a hill coming up. As you approach this hill, you're still accelerating to try to get up it, but for some reason, the transmission isn't downshifting.

A possible reason why the transmission wouldn't wanna downshift is because of the speed that you're going at. It doesn't really think that it needs to downshift but what you're noticing is that your speed is slowly decreasing. So, essentially, at this point, what you might wanna do is go ahead and push on that negative button or the minus button. What that's gonna do is it's gonna go ahead and put your transmission down into the next lowest gear. So if you're cruising along in eighth gear, essentially, if you have an eight-speed transmission, it's gonna go ahead and try to put it into seventh gear. This, of course, is gonna boost up your RPMs and give you a little bit more torque to get up that hill. Maybe it's not enough, go ahead and hit that negative button one more time, it's gonna drop down one more gear. Maybe at this point, you go ahead and you get up to the top of that hill and you start coming on back down. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go ahead and hit that plus button until it comes back up into the eighth gear or even back up into the drive system. So once you have it back onto the D without having any number there, more than likely, that's gonna go ahead and activate your MDS system if you have that. Essentially, that's for fuel saving.

If you need more information on that, check out the link below. Or maybe you're the type of person that likes to be in a little bit more control of your drive system. Maybe you like to just drive around in third gear whenever you're driving around in the city. You like to have that little bit of pep every time you step on the accelerator. Other situations where you might use this might be you're the type of person that likes to drive around in a manual transmission. You've always had one. That's what you learn to drive on like most of us, and essentially, this is gonna make your automatic feel a little bit more like home. Or maybe you prefer to use the engine as a brake instead of using your actual automobile brakes. Typically, what you can do for that is if you're coming to an area where you need to slow down, you can go ahead and downshift and just use the engine to slow you down. What you're gonna notice as you tend to do this is that the engine RPMs will go up as you start to downshift. The RPMs are going up, but you're not actually accelerating. So the engine's force is gonna be trying to slow down your car for you putting a lot less pressure on those brakes.

This is gonna especially be handy in situations where maybe you're driving down a long steep hill, maybe such as driving down Mount Washington Road or something like that where you don't necessarily wanna just keep riding your brakes the whole way down, heating them up so they're gonna pulsate on you when you get off the road. And then, of course, maybe you just wanna try to use that if you're just driving down the road or down a highway where, like I said, you have a nice deep hill and you don't necessarily wanna be using your brakes all the time. Or maybe the person on the side of you at the red light is revving up his engine and we're both waiting for the green light. So maybe we should talk about some reasons why you shouldn't be using this. Not everybody is going to be the best at multitasking. Typically, getting behind the wheel is gonna require a lot of multitasking. You have to pay attention to the road, what's going on in front of you, on the sides of you, behind you. You gotta make sure you get your seatbelt on and, of course, make sure that you're going the proper speed. This is a lot of things to think about and, of course, having to figure out when to shift and where to shift is, of course, an extra thing that maybe some people just don't wanna think about.

Maybe you're trying to get on the highway. You just came from a stop. You're getting ready to get onto that on-ramp. So you're going one, two, three. As you're getting on the on-ramp, you're seeing a whole bunch of traffic coming at you, so you're paying attention to that. Finally, you've got a space that you can get out, so you go ahead and hammer on that gas a little bit. [Vocalization] You start accelerating to try to get out into the traffic that's moving approximately 65 or whatever the speed limit is, but for some reason, you're not necessarily paying attention to the fact that you should be shifting. If you're stuck inside third gear, the transmission isn't gonna go any higher than that even though it wants to. Typically, what's gonna happen is your RPMs are just gonna go [Vocalization], and you might even go [Vocalization] at the end which is, of course, your rev limiter. At that point, you're probably gonna realize that I forgot to shift and maybe you're even gonna think to yourself, "Maybe I don't really need to be in the manual select mode." Of course, there's those people that just like to get in their car and go. They just wanna hop in, buckle up, start up the car, put it in drive, and drive down the road. They don't wanna think about much else because they got a whole lot going on. Like I said before, you got a lot of things to pay attention to. What's going on in front of you, the sides of you, behind you, and, of course, the speed limit.

One more thing to pay attention to is just a hassle for some people. And, of course, we should probably talk about the possibility for transmission or even engine damage. Theoretically, if you're driving down the highway doing the speed limit as you should, and if you were to go ahead and hold on to that negative button or minus button wherever it happens to be located, theoretically what should happen is your transmission's automatically gonna go down into what it believes it's the safest gear. So, essentially, if you're in eighth gear because you have an eight-speed transmission, you hold that negative button, it's gonna come down a couple of gears. And essentially, what that's gonna wanna do is it's gonna bring your RPMs way up and, of course, it comes way up for too long of a period of time or even too abruptly, you could potentially cause damage to either, like I said, your transmission or your engine. Whatever the case, the use of this system is essentially gonna give you the power to decide when the transmission is gonna shift. So, essentially, if you decided that you want to put your transmission in fifth gear, what that's gonna do is it makes it so the transmission has the opportunity to use gears one through five. If you were to put it in third gear, you got one through three.

If you go ahead and put it up in whatever your top gear is, whether it's six or even eight, that's gonna make sure that you can go ahead and go up to that particular gear. Also by using the manual shift option for these types of transmissions, what it's gonna do is it's gonna turn off your fuel-saving mode on your particular application. Theoretically, if you were to have a Mopar type of car or a Chrysler of some sort, you're gonna have an MDS system, which essentially means that it's gonna turn off multiple cylinders on your engine and it's gonna help you save fuel overall. So instead of using all eight cylinders when you want them, you're gonna be using four. But if you use this particular system where you're kinda doing your own shifting, it's gonna temporarily disable that so you have all eight cylinders or however many cylinders you happen to have for your application all the time. And one last thing that I wanna mention. You don't necessarily have to worry about going into the system and back out and back in and back out as you're driving. You don't have to worry about confusing it or even breaking it. An exception of, for some reason, if you go ahead and hold down that negative button while you're driving and it downshifts too abruptly.

Aside from that, happy shifting. And just as a word of caution, if you were to do this in a slippery condition such as maybe snowy conditions, you could potentially lose control of your vehicle. Okay, friends, so that's pretty much all I've got for you on a car's ERS system. I hope this video helped you out a little bit and I hope you learned a little something. If you did learn something or maybe you got a little story to tell, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. If you liked the video, smash on that like button for me. It'll mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. That way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.