I don't, but have been told that by dealers and have read it in magazines. The guys I grew up with all still have sticks. Mom and dad still have sticks, but of the 6 nephews and nieces, only one has a stick despite the fact that I personally taught them all to drive in a stick. I don't really care too much what others drive, but I am quite alarmed that one day my desire to push pedals and stir the pot of my own will might be a special order option.
Any info you come across Taco dude, please post here. Obviously, I'm interested.
With regard to the CC problem: I purchased a 1982 Supra new. It had AT with OD. The cruise was absolutely usless. I couldn't go over an overpass without shifting down. Dealer said that's normal. Normal and Useless can sometimes be the same thing. My next Toyota was 22 years later when I bought a 2003 4runner V6 NEW. What has changed at Toyota since '82??? Now "screeming fan belt in the morning", and "an always present noisey valve" are "NORMAL." With Toyota ya takes what ya gets or go buy something else.
Now, I don't doubt that Toyota may have its cruise control programmed in a stupid way, because it behaves oddly with my V-6 Tacoma. But with a 4 cylinder, perhaps the programming gets even stranger. The designer has to make some sort of assumptions about how the thing should work, and with a
4-cylinder, those assumptions are made even more severe because the CC has to adjust more....powerfully (?-don't have the right word) than it would with a 6-cyl under the same circumstances.
I find that there are roads where it doesn't pay at all to use cruise control. On one particular highway around here, there are too many hills, and no cruise control in existence is able to do what a good driver does: accelerate a little bit BEFORE going up the hill. I'm sure you've done that in such a way that the vehicle doesn't need to downshift at all, because you added maybe 2-3 mph before the incline.
Maybe CC should come with a button that adds a certain amount of speed until the computer somehow detects that the incline is gone. The "certain amount of speed" could be adjustable by the driver to be a constant thing that fits your terrain.
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