Cruise control

I have a 2012 Ram Laramie and use cruise all the time in T/H mode. I have been up mountain roads and the most my tranny has heated up was 157 degrees (according to my onboard display). Hemi Power is awesome but then again I am a little biased. I say use cruise. I have never had a problem. As long as you are in tow/haul mode, there will be no problems due to shifting when it needs to shift.

Jim

Thanks for the responses and the advice from all. I'll be on the highway a bit this weekend and will try the cruise. Now I'll know what to look for to make an informed decision to keep the cruise on or not.

I use cruise all the time, but each vehicle is different. If your throttle and transmission is doing the same thing you'd do manually, why not let it do it automatically? I can spend less time looking at the speedometer and more time watching the other important things like my mirrors, temp gauges, etc. At highway speeds my vehicle pretty much either runs locked up in 3rd or with the TC unlocked in 3rd. On rare occasions it will drop to 2nd if I push the pedal to the floor but the cruise won't make that happen unless my speed drops quite a bit. Now if my vehicle wanted to kick down a gear more than I'd prefer, I'd probably be more selective about when I use cruise control. As someone else stated, I think under some circumstances I can probably get better fuel economy by trying to use lighter throttle up the hills and keeping the TC locked up.

There's no reason not to use "Cruise", but I noticed that you have a gasser and that might be a problem, because the Cruise generally forces a downshift on the slightest of grades. I had this problem with our '03 Silverado 5.3. I was able to alleviate that downshifting to some extent by locking out Overdrive. I always drove it in T/H to keep the transmission fluid temperatures lower.

We now have a diesel and I use Cruise all the time. I put the tranny into T/H and set the Cruise at about 65 and it'll run all day at the speed without downshifting unless I've hit a relatively steep or long grade.

My reason for NOT using cruise (Ford F350 6.4 diesel towing fifth-wheel) is transmission wants to downshift on slight upgrade. I find that I use less fuel by building up speed (using as little throttle as possible) before slight upgrades, letting speed drop on upgrade, then building up speed on downgrade. The idea is to avoid too many downshifts.

Even on flat-as-pancake Florida interstates, my truck tries to downshift when going up an overpass. As an experiment, I tried 100 miles with cruise on, then 100 miles with cruise off. MPG improved from 9.0 to 10.1. In hilly country, the difference is greater.

Schertz wrote:
Have traveled many miles with cruise on and toad hitched without an issue.

Ditto

I agree with both of the above unless your owners manual recommends against it - which I doubt.
Barney

Have traveled many miles with cruise on and toad hitched without an issue.

No reason at all not to use cruise control...
If you get into hills/mts and the tranny starts 'hunting' (up and down shifting often) shut cruise off..

Hunting will heat up your tranny.