DrewE wrote:
The motorhome will work if you don't move the shift lever at all while driving. You might not like Ford's choices of shift points, but there's no inherent reason why you frequently need to move the shift lever while driving, and hence no real safety concern from lighter plugs being a bit in the way.
Have you tried using tow/haul mode (assuming you have the five speed transmission)? It helps a good bit to make the automatic shifting somewhat less crazed squirrel like. (Tow/haul does not lock out overdrive, as some people occasionally assume. The older four-speed transmissions did have an overdrive off button instead of tow/haul mode, and that, true to its name, does lock out overdrive.)
When descending long winding roads in the mountains while towing our Jeep Liberty, I need to down-shift much sooner than the transmission will do on it's own in tow-haul mode. If I left the transmission in drive, I run the risk of being a run-away truck. The alternative would be to brake hard and often to allow the tow-haul to eventually kick into a lower gear.
It is much better on the brakes & safer over-all to slow down the vehicle in a lower gear sooner, than to brake hard to get the transmission into a lower gear on it's own later.
My experience says manually down-shifting sooner works best for our situation. So having 12V plugs and USB wires in the way of the gear shifter is a very VERY bad thing. Moving all that to the passenger side will be a good resolve.
