this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Oh my god when we moved from Oklahoma to a town in the mountains of Vermont this issue made the last day of driving hell! It's my fault for not checking the route on such a big trip though.
We had visited this town several times and always drove in on a major interstate with no issues. Well when we were finally loaded up with the 26' U-haul and towing a car behind, I just selected the default route to our new address in VT.
It was fine up until the last day when we started to get to the mountains and to my horror it was taking us on these tiny one lane roads up extremely steep mountains and super narrow roads.
When going downhill I was braking as hard as I could and the U-Haul was barely even slowing down and the brakes would be smoking at the bottom. And on the way up I was flooring it and barely getting up to 20 mph sometimes.
It's a miracle the truck made it through the dirt roads at the end. We finally rolled into town on what I now know is a historic, scenic route that the leaf peepers like to take.
Note for future - even with an automatic transmission, you can shift into a lower gear (2 or even L) on a downhill to have the engine slow you down and save your brakes.
The U-Haul automatically downshifts to engine break in tow mode when you tap the breaks. That was with engine breaking, the engine was screaming.
The gear selector also had the options for M, 2, 1 but I didn't use them for fear of blowing up the engine if it went at an even higher RPM.