Originally posted by JimBlake
You talking about a specific car? Most times that's marketing mumbo-jumbo that just means another gear.
Ford Contour has a button you press that keeps it out from 4th gear. This does EXACTLY the same thing as taking your Honda & putting the shift lever into D3.
The days are long gone when top gear in any transmission was direct-drive. Manual transmissions with separate OD gears (old british cars, '76 Volvos...) are something else entirely.
Both my '82 and '88 Volvos (244 DL and 744 Ti, respectively) had the M46 transmission - five speed manual with the "fifth speed" being a button-operated overdrive. The way I understood it, when you pressed the button, it allowed another gear to interact with fourth, acting as a reductor and lowering the ratio. Why they did it that way, I have NO idea.