Cruise Control Downshifting

flavionics wrote:
..t the Cruise Control can be adjusted somehow as to not down shift when going up the slightest hill.

Just to be clear, the cruise doesn't downshift, the transmission does.

Shift it yourself, before the vehicle is struggling on the hill. I've done this in many trucks.

I've had this in several trucks. The cruise is trying to maintain speed.
I ended up shutting off cruise. I can let it lose some speed on the uphill and gain it back on the down hill.
Sounds like it is doing it's intended job.
I don't believe there is a way to reprogram the ECM.

My guess is the older MH had better power to weight ratio so it was set to hold in the higher gear on steeper hills. The new one presumably is lugging the engine on less steep hills, so it downshifts.

There's a reason it wants to downshift. If it does it once in a great while, just let it. If it's doing it every few minutes, turn the cruise control off so you can bleed off a little speed rather than downshifting or manually drop down and run in a lower gear.

I find if there are any significant hills, it's usually easier to manually run the throttle as I can feather it to bleed off some speed on the uphill and pick up speed on the downhill without a lot of downshifting.

You don't give the age but does it have the tow/haul mode that a lot of the newer pickups have? They seem to do a better job.

I'd suggest you take it out of cruise control when entering hill country. The cruise control is doing it's intended job of trying to maintain speed.

Ford has set the control window too tight. I don't think there is anything you can do about it unless you can figure out how to change the control parameters in the ECM. Maybe 5 star tuning could do this.

You can try and help it by tapping down the cruise speed while going up the hill.

As has been mentioned earlier, neither do I use cruise control. Don't need to be the first to the top of the hill. My MPG is much better!

Best to turn cruise off or drop speed by 10 mph if you are approaching a road that will cause what seems to be an unneeded downshift.

Otherwise to really fix it I think you would need to change the differential gears to run higher RPM in general conditions. Probably not worth it.

I have learned to help the cruise control on slight grades, such as going up on an overpass. I press the accelerator down slightly which increases the speed slightly. I hold the accelerator down till I have topped the grade and then slowly take my foot off the accelerator. It takes a few tries to learn how to do it correctly.

But, I too think Ford should provide some individual tuning of the speed control as everybody has a different load. One standard computer program works for only an insignificant few. For the rest of us it would be nice if we had some control of the computer parameters.

I set the cruise control at the top of the grade. It will down shift and hold your speed down the grade. Until you brake the first time and it shuts off.

I shut mine OFF & hold the RPM at max torque for uphill climbs.