I thought I'd started a thread on this, but apparently, I buried it somewhere else...

On my '00, the "pull-through" shifts on the autobox are D->3, and 3->D.

This is a bit annoying to me, for 3 reasons:

• Substantially every other automatic car I have driven in 27 years was R->N->D, D->N,
• That makes it much easier to bump in and out of neutral without accidentally going into reverse (which I *almost* did, once, while still coasting down, but I luckily have good reflexes, and
• The manual *actually suggests* that you idle at stoplights in Neutral.

So, given that, has anyone had their shifter quadrant apart *far enough* to know what the plate which controls this looks like, and would it be possible to machine a replacement that would make it shift in the expected fashion?

The FMVSS on automatic transmissions is 102, but it specifies only the order, not which stops must require an extra action (push button, pull column shifter towards you).

 

In related news (as I reread the AT section of the RAVE), if you've ever felt like your 4-speed auto has 6 or 7 gears...

remember a) that it has a lockup torque converter, so you'll feel it going from "4th into 5th"...

and that it backs the engine torque off slightly before a shift (I can often feel this happening in both the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts).