I live in Eastern Kentucky and we have a lot of hills. There are a couple of places where you have to start uphill from a stop. This thing struggles uphill and takes forever to shift gears. On one long hill it will stay at 4k rpm until I reach the top of the hill. Is this normal? 2.0 six speed. Should I use the manual downshift?

 

If you do use the manual downshift and shift to higher gear ,it should upshift if speed is high enough.

 

Im worried about shifting into the wrong gear.

 

If you don't over speed the engine, you can down shift to the next lower gear and usually have no problem. As soon as you place the lever in the normal position it will shift to the next gear. You just don't want to go from something like 5th gear down to 2nd. You might try downshifting a few times to know what to expect and then you will be more comfortable controlling the gears.

 

It won’t let me do anything that could harm the transmission would it? I’m making mistakes getting used to this.

 

Your vehicle does have a console shift , yes -- no ?

 

Console shift?

 

Console shift is a shift in front of the seat on the floor.
Did you check your owner's manual regarding trans shifting options.

 

I’m familiar with how it works. When I go up some hills I will be going about 45-50 about 3500k rpm. Should I shift up a gear to bump the rpm’s down?

 

That is the idea of an automatic trans. You should not need to manually select any gear unless you want to. The trans is designed to downshift automatically if necessary and if higher RPMs are required there is a reason it goes there, automatically.