highway cruse control launch from 2 to 5k rpm on small hill ?

In cruise control doing 70 mph. I approached a hill (gradual 300-400 ft rise) I've taken a hundred times before in other Toyota trucks. My 2016 TRD has 2k miles, suddenly the engine went from 2-5 grand in a nano-second and held it. I've never experienced behavior this before using cruse control. The first time it happened I thought the engine was stuck at WOT. This truck has plenty of HP and torque, if I was pulling a load I could understand...

Anyone care to comment ?

 

A decade of bad cruise control programming on Tacoma trucks.

They all do the same thing.

 

I've had 4 Tundra's and that engineering division got their ECU programming right. My ex's company makes ICE's and ARM's for the automotive and aircraft industry; I believe it would take a day to tune the ECU chip governing the engine, transmission and cruise control parameters

 

I certainly agree with the decade old issue of poor cruise programming, but I have never experienced 5K on the tach, and I live in the Western Carolina hills.

G.

 

The manual transmission is the only solution, or don't use cruise.

 

I run the grades near Hendersonville and Asheville at 70 mph all day long with cruise on in S4. Solid as a rock. Hit the down grades and put in in "D".
70 mph in S4 is around 3200 RPM.
G.

 

Eyeing the tach is an old habit of mine, it was exactly 5K and stayed there until I crested the hill. I have a lot of experience driving at speed, but honestly this 'smackdown' caught me off guard.

 

I can see where that would get your attention! I don't think mine has ever seen 5K.

G.

 

Everytime I put my Taco on cruise, I wonder, ''is the damn thing even working?'' The lag is quite annoying as is the speed accuracy. I'd imagine part of that is trying to eke out a bi more mileage, on some of my older trucks I could get at least 2 MPG more with the CC off as compared to using it. 2 MPG is quite a difference on a several hundred mile trip.

 

That is the one knock that i have found in my 16 vs. my 07! The tranny is all over place shifting constantly on slight grades some times you couldnt call it a grade. I sure hope someone comes out with a programmer to change the shift points until then i will continue to manually shift ! If i didnt live in Socal in drive in non stop bumper to bumper traffic i would have gone with the manual tranny i test drove the stick and it was real nice!

 

OP, plenty of threads on this .... auto tranny shifting continuosly. Mine is the same.

The 3.5L does not have enough torque/power to maintain speeds above 70 - 75mph.

I am in Texas; some highways are posted at 80mph. At 9000 miles, I get about 16mpg.

I quit using the cruise, and get better mileage, and the crazy shifting ends.

Here is a few pics my wife took when I was driving. I also calculated mileage manually.

 

We just got back from an 800 mile road trip from Colorado to South Dakota and back and we experienced this issue w/ the cruise control. Caught me off guard the first time it happened. After the second time we stopped using the cruise control. Wish we got better milage but we fought crazy winds the entire trip.

 

Last year I bought a new VW Passat TDI with six speed auto trans. Diesels put of a lot of torque all over the engine RPM range but what I found was I couldn't drive it in 'D' as the engine RPM dropped below the sweet spot and lugged. I switched to shifting it in stick mode. It didn't make any sense to me, so I went to the dealer's service dept and was told it was "NORMAL"...The service mgr told me VW tuned the vehicle for max fuel economy. So I guess fuel economy took 2nd place over vehicle drivability in VW's collective mind. I sold the car 2 weeks later...

Can't quite understand what the Toyota engineers were thinking when they programmed the Taco's 3rd Gen's transmission but it seems like MPG was #1 on the list, to the detriment of everything else.

 

The new CAFE standards are going to kill the small truck market the way it is set up. MPG IS #1 on the list with everything else in second place. The next 10 years are going to bring some significant changes to the antomotive and truck world unless people with 1/2 a brain and some scientific understanding step in and bitch slap the greenie turds running the EPA/CARB/CAFE.