Electronically Controlled Interactive Shift Control System for Motor Vehicles 2001-01-2477

The system being presented here enables an automatic transmission in a motor vehicle to react to the driving characteristics of a driver in the way and speed with which it shifts. It provides for fail-safe fully electronic control of the transmission including park lock FMVSS compliance, and allows all mechanical links between the shift control and the transmission to be eliminated.

The ‘tiptronic’-type shift systems known today provide some measure of manual control of an automatic transmission, as they allow sequential ‘up & down’ selection of forward drive gears. Nevertheless, even as the forward gears are selected manually, the transmission is designed to shift between those gears in a predetermined manner, irrespective of the driver's intentions. These shift characteristics are necessarily a design compromise and not optimized to the situation the driver finds himself in at any particular moment, and usually detracts from the overall driving experience.

The present system takes these commonly available sequential systems and adds the ability to modulate, or vary, the manner in which the transmission shifts from one gear to another, based entirely on real-time feedback pertinent to the situation.