Originally Posted By: SteveSRT8
Lugging is an old school term that has little bearing (pun?) on modern motors.
You will not damage any part of a healthy drivetrain by operating it at low revs with large throttle openings.
No carbs or vacuum advance involved here.
Modern cars are load limited by the ECU, and if your car is drive by wire (DBW) you flooring it to WOT won't cause the flapper to open any more than the ECU deems necessary.
As far as how much bearing lugging has on modern engines I guess I'm just old school - if I can even be old school at 26
. Never the less, I still believe that if you don't have enough torque to easily accelerate or need to go WOT just to get up to speed you need to hold off a bit on the shift. The simple fact is that you'll have less cylinder pressures, larger hydro-wedge as the rolly rollies start rollin, and less pressure perturbations causing excessive fatigue on relatively cold rings, lands and anything else that might be prone to cracking later on down the road. JMO.
FWIW, my gramma lugs her 97 Ranger all over the place, drives her trash 100 yards in the middle of winter to the road to be picked up once a week, has duct tape on her intake box to seal it, and generally neglects the poor truck, and it runs like a champ after nearly 100k. Maybe her truck will die an early death because of this at 150k or maybe it'll run forever. I don't know, but I still choose to over-maintain my vehicle for what we all like to have; peace of mind. My peace of mind includes warming my car up as quickly as possible with out lugging the motor, and getting over this whole spending-too-much-money-on-lubes-and-changing-them-out-too-soon kick - I'm at 5350 miles on this OCI in my Suby STI with RTS, and I've got the itch. But, I digress haha