Johnhw2

I'm heading to New Mexico mountains for Christmas. There are some steep downhill spots where in my AWD Infiniti SUV I downshift to avoid breaking on a potentially slick downhill road. This one spot requires first gear to hold to a slow safe speed, I manually shift my SUV. Is there any reason I can not do the same with my AWD 2014 LS460L?

ClaytonW

Why not, I live in mountains and of course I use downshifting quite often. Just be carefull on slippery roads while downshifting. If you will go too fast, it's similar to stepping on breaks.
Don't forget for good tires. I have Bridgestone Blizzak WS80 on my LS460 AWD and they are the best winter tires I ever had.

Nospinzone

#1 Clayton is spot on.

#2 I'm jealous!

Have fun and drive carefully.

Arvid

Hi,
#1 Clayton is spot on.

I had last winter 3 x 1300 miles round trips in the Norwegain mountains and just put my LS600hL in snow mode...
The accelerator’s pedal response in Snow mode softens it, making acceleration easier in slippery conditions..... but still be easy on the brakes..use the manual downshift to take down the speed as soft as possible.... and the car behave way better then anything else I have driven...

My former "beast" , an 1993 LS400, (owned from 2002 to 2011) was just that...a beast on snowy/icy roads.. terrible to drive in those conditions without having the boot full of sandbags... Can't even remember how many times I got stuck whith that one.....it's like night and day :-)

Arvid