To improve ground vehicle efficiency, shift schedule energy saving was proposed for the ground vehicle automatic transmission by studying the function of the torque converter and transmission in the vehicular drivetrain. The shift schedule can keep the torque converter working in the high efficiency range under all the working conditions except in the low efficiency range on the left when the transmission worked at the lowest shift, and in the low efficiency range on the right when the transmission worked at the highest shift. The shift quality key factors were analysed. The automatic trans-mission's bench-test adopting this shift schedule was made on the automatic transmission's test-bed. The experimental results showed that the shift schedule was correct and that the shift quality was controllable.