markcincinnati

And how do I go about "starting in M2?"

I have just returned from lunch and I tried every combination of approaches I could dream up to "force" a start in 2nd. My car ALWAYS starts in first -- NO MATTER WHAT.

I even tried putting the car in M and upshifting -- no dice. The car will not start out in any other gear than first.

Talbot

I was just going to keep my mouth shut and not say this, I swear... but now I have to point out that in your picture your speed is 1 mph. If we're going to do this right, your evidence REALLY needs to indicate that the vehicle is not in motion. At least in my [overly] pedantic opinion. In my own experiments, my car is still in 2nd gear too at this speed. Must be complete stop.

ibu11et

Confirmed. I cannot intentionally start in second either. The is perplexing.

ibu11et

I'll capture it today on the way home. It was stationary in D2 for about a minute prior to fishing out the phone to take a pic. Try and get it at 1mph and in D2 though. Good luck.

18s5

strange, i will have to test mine out as well.
does the mmi show the ecu version we can compare with each other?

Talbot

I accept your challenge!

markcincinnati

What in the wide wide world of sports was Car & Driver on about?

markcincinnati

Have "we all" rebooted ("Restart MMI" in the owner's manual) our cars lately? My wife's top-view camera went dark. Rebooted the darn thing and "ta da" all's well.

Years ago, I used to tell my clients to reboot their PC's at least once per week -- just because. The because was it cut support calls to my company's help desk by over 50%. I have no idea if the PC's really needed booting or not (and this was PRE Windows 7), but damned if client satisfaction didn't improve. I was unable to figure out why my client's PC's would "not act right," I just figured since I had tried everything else, why not just reboot regularly and frequently. I "hoped" it would work, and even thought it might work sometimes. Worked half the time -- the other half of the time was "operator error."

I'm thinking a "restart" -- which is sort of like alt, ctrl, delete -- of the MMI "just because" might not be a bad idea from time to time.

I'm going to try it -- have only done it once in 5,800 miles. What could it hurt?

Even if you say, "It should not come to this," I say, no big deal -- IF it works. My home theater has so many surround sound modes sometimes the thing just becomes mono (and this is a 2016 vintage Marantz pre-pro), so, I turn it off, unplug it, plug it back in and turn it on and all's well. DTS Nero + and Dolby Atmos bla bla bla indeed!

ibu11et

For those that don't have the Owner's Manual memorized yet (Mark). It's on page 253. (The book of A4/S4, Chapter 5, Verse 1 [just kidding])

markcincinnati

You know, I'm all for "devices" that have no user manuals and NO NEED for user manuals. But, we're just not there yet. So, yeah, I get a new car, I read the manual.

I'll tell on myself -- but also risk showing my fading memory -- I bought an Acura TL SH-AWD Advance. The damn thing had, as I recall 250+ voice commands it would recognize. I found the book that had them in it -- and read it.

Two of my co-workers have late model Acura/Honda vehicles with the Technology Group in them. I go to lunch with them and say "Passenger temperature 70." The little digital read-out on my side of the car responds and my co-worker quips, "I've had this car since 2014, and I never knew it could do that."

I reach inside the glove box and pull out the manual and (at the appropriately safe moment) show them. It is not lost on me that simply reaching over and cranking the **** is not a reasonable alternative solution to setting the passenger temp, but I like the "Geek Squad" approach -- I can't help it, I started out life a computer programmer.

The point is, Audi REMOVED the built-in video owner's manual from our S4's (why?), so, if you want to get the most out of your $60,000 appliance, why not read the friggin' manual.

When I picked up my car, no one told me that I had to PUSH the turn signal stalk to activate the automatic high/low beams. Until I read the manual I thought mine was malfunctioning.

Oh, hell, you get the idea. There's so much tech, so many millions of instructions and "IF THEN ELSE" routines in this software it's like trying (and succeeding) to write the largest Excel spreadsheet ever written which, as I understand it can have at least 256,000,000 cells PER BOOK and 256,000,000 books, each one referring to cells in the other 255,999,999.

I'm so old, I used to recall folks asking, "Is it possible to write a program (source code) so large that an IBM mainframe can't compile it?" Of course, initially, that was in the days when the largest program could only have 64,000 instructions. Last time I looked, even a "mini-computer" can accept 128 Trillion instructions before it hollars "I quit"!

I have to assume our Audis have perhaps hundreds of millions of instructions just to figure out when to turn on traffic jam assist and when to tell you to put your hands back on the steering wheel.

Geesh. Quit pickin' on me.