Our pickup, you can push the gear stick left and it becomes basically manual with no clutch. You tell it to change gears and it will except when it says "no" ie high speeds and you ask to change down a gear when it's high revs in current gear, it beeps at you and won't change.

We've found that more than adequate for towing a 19ft caravan.

[–] limelight79@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Our Mazda has "manual" control of the automatic where you can tell it to shift by clicking a button or moving the gear selector. But like yours it won't do anything stupid. I've played with a few times, but I just can't get into it.

For towing (or hauling heavy loads in general) - you definitely need to be able to lock out higher gears sometimes in the mountains. If your transmission is hunting between gears, then lock it to a lower one. Our pickup has a tow/haul mode that handles this automatically; the motorhome I had before just had an "overdrive" button that locked out the overdrive gear for the same reason.