Hey guys,

I've scoured the internet but I can't find anyone talking about this (most posts are about manual cars). I have an older automatic car from 1998 and I'm really not interested in performance metrics like 0-60 speed, how much torque I can get, how fast I can accelerate from a stop, etc. I am, however, very much interested in higher MPG.

After experimenting with some light hypermiling it seems to me that the key is to get the car into third gear or higher ASAP. The other choice is to accelerate extreeeeeemely slowly from a dead stop to never go above 1600RPM. That doesn't work if you have people behind you, you'll make them rage, obviously.

I've started experimenting with revving up to 2kRPM and then letting off the gas to try to trick the computer into shifting up for me, but it doesn't really work and I feel like I'm revving the engine high for nothing. I even tried setting it only to "3" (D123 config) in the hopes that it would start me off in third gear already, but it looks like it only limits your gear to the first three, so that's useless.

Is there another way to get your automatic car to shift up really fast? Are there mechanics out there that can reprogram the ECU to have a much lighter tolerance for shifting up (and therefore shift up gears much earlier, even though my speed/performance would suffer)?