The shift point that changes with load
EV·ENGINE's presets carry a single upshift point, tuned for pressing on. The V10 sets it at 4,600 rpm. Used for cruising too, that number would hold second gear at 4,000 rpm doing a steady 50 km/h. The gearbox instead scales the threshold down for light throttle, then lets acceleration lift it back toward the press-on figure.
One number, two jobs
The V10 preset's upshift point sits at 4,600 rpm. That is the threshold for pressing on: foot down, engine loaded, changing up as late as the driver wants the scream. Cruising uses a lower threshold, calculated from the same figure, and the gearbox is meant to choose between the two depending on how hard the car is accelerating.
Feed the press-on figure into both jobs and the arithmetic goes wrong at low load. Second gear on this preset covers 12.5 km/h for every 1,000 rpm, so a steady 50 km/h sits at 4,000 rpm. That is short of 4,600, so a gearbox using only the press-on threshold would hold second gear rather than change up, and the V10 would cruise a suburban street at nearly half its redline for no reason beyond the road speed asking for it.
A lower threshold for cruising
The gearbox scales the press-on figure down by a fixed fraction, 0.62, to get the threshold it uses when the driver is not loading the engine. For the V10 that puts the cruising shift point at 2,852 rpm, comfortably under half the redline of 8,500 and nearly two thousand rpm below the press-on figure.
Third gear on this preset covers 17.5 km/h per 1,000 rpm, so the same steady 50 km/h sits at 2,857 rpm there, slightly above the cruising threshold. That is enough to trigger the upshift into fourth, where 50 km/h drops to 2,174 rpm. The car covers the same road at the same speed nearly two thousand rpm lower, and the difference is entirely in which threshold decided the shift.
Load pulls the threshold back up
The gap between the two thresholds closes as acceleration rises. Because EV·ENGINE has no pedal signal, load is read from how quickly GPS speed itself is changing, and each metre per second squared of that acceleration adds 1,500 rpm to the cruising threshold, moving it toward the fixed press-on figure rather than past it. For the V10, an acceleration of a little over 1.16 m/s² is already enough to reach the full 4,600 rpm, well short of the 2.5 m/s² the preset treats as full load.
A threshold that moves with every change in acceleration could flap between gears as the car crosses it back and forth. The gearbox guards against that with a minimum gap between shifts, 500 ms, the same fix that closed the cascading downshift bug found earlier. Braking and cruising also get different downshift points, 2,750 rpm under braking against 1,500 rpm on a lifted throttle, so easing off gently and standing on the brake do not drop into the same gear at the same rpm.
What to listen for
The V10 preset's bass emphasis fades out above 2,600 rpm, close enough to the cruising threshold of 2,852 rpm that the two nearly coincide. Play the clip and listen through that stretch: the note thins right where the cruising shift point sits, because the sub oscillator and the 82 Hz cabin peak it drives have already dropped away. Higher up, past four thousand rpm and on toward the press-on threshold at 4,600, a brightness setting of 150 puts far more of the engine's upper orders into the sound, which is the scream the redline is for.
None of that changes what fires the note: five firings a revolution and a firing unevenness low enough that the V10 screams rather than shouts hold regardless of which threshold picked the gear. What changes is where in that scream the car happens to be sitting once it settles into a cruise, and that is a question about the gearbox rather than the engine.
A shift point tuned only for pressing on would leave every cruising driver revving harder than the road needs, and one tuned only for cruising would clip the scream a driver presses on for. The V10 preset needs both, scaled by how hard the car is accelerating at any given moment, which is the same load figure the rest of the gearbox already runs on.
Hear it
Ten seconds each: an acceleration run through the gears, then the overrun. The same presets the numbers above come from.
- ITALIAN V10 5.22.0 · high-rev scream