I wondered if anyone has had a similar problem or has a solution to this.

My Outlander has a problem when under light to medium acceleration the CVT seems to select too higher gear ratio too soon. For example if I’m accelerating, the revs drop and I either have to wait a moment for it to decide to re-select a lower ratio (which sometimes it won’t do at all) or press the throttle down further to get a more instant reaction. It seems to mainly occur if I’m accelerating from slow speeds like when I’ve slowed up (but not stopped) for a roundabout, I’ve never had it occur when accelerating from a standstill.

I guess if the car was a conventional automatic rather than a CVT you could say it was changing up from 2nd to 3rd gear too soon before then deciding to change back down to 2nd again.

I was thinking maybe it’s a problem with my driving style but I’ve driven dozens of different kinds of automatic vehicles before and never had this issue. Can anybody help?

 

In the owner's manual it does state shifting on the CVT may be erratic until the vehicle's computer "learns" your driving patterns. In fact if you dis-connect the battery (which causes the computer to lose this information) the manual warns shifting may be erratic until it's re-learned.

I have 22,000 miles on my Outlander so it's been too long for me to remember what it was like when I first bought the vehicle new, but I don't have that problem now. In fact when I accelerate from a slow speed, for example when entering a highway, it really takes off and the RPM's go up high and then drop off as my speed is reached.

 

Correct. The transmission is adaptive. However I'm not sure if it will re-learn once it has learnt one style. You may have to disconnect the battery and start over and be aggressive this time.

 

Thanks guys, I think disconnecting the battery would be a good starting point. I’ve owned the car since last November and only covered about 1,000 miles so it might still have some of the previous owners driving habits stored in it. I’ll give it a good blast with plenty of acceleration when the battery is reconnected and see what happens!