"Sounds like a good buy to me. Most people don't know how to drive a diesel. If you need to accelerate hard, put it in low and keep your foot down, shifting up immediately when you feel the turbo cut in--ignore second, and go right to drive. The car won't respond immediately, but it will shift when it wants,"
How's this any different than simply putting it in drive to begin with and keeping the accelerator floored? In either case, is seems the car is going to shift when it wants to. All your doing is shifting from low to drive when your reach about 2500 RPMs and I would think the car is going to go through second on its way to drive regardless of whether you do this or let it do it's normal thing. Plus, I would think the car would accelerate faster going through 2nd, rather than skipping it, even if you could.
"and it should be much smoother than if you make the shifts by backing off the accelerator and shifting one gear at a time. There are a few things you can do under the hood to make shifting smoother if it's too hard, or tweak the turbo
cut-in point--check out the threads here on Groups. "
Shift by backing off the accelerator? Who here does that? And why would you back off at all, depriving the engine of max fuel, when you want hard acceleration? I just keep my foot on the accelerator and let the tranny do the shifting. Ain't that what an auto tranny is all about?