I'm kind of surprised you aren't describing any "dying when I take my foot off the gas" symptoms. Often, cars without the VSS hooked up will die, when you are cruising and suddenly take your foot off the gas and hit the brakes, even with the automatic. My car would die under those conditions if I depressed the clutch at the same time.

Doesn't happen to everyone though. I know some guys here aren't even using the idle speed motor.

VSS is used by EEC-IV to recognize deceleration and warm idle. If you are decelerating under certain conditions, the fuel injectors shut off completely. So you might see some gas mileage changes. The signal is some kind of pulse, the voltage doesn't vary.

I don't know about alternative VSS's for automatics, sorry. But I do know that you can relocate the VSS by having a cable drive hooked up to the normal point, and then having a VSS at the end of the cable.

What kind of car do you have, and does it have ABS? If you've got ABS, you can probably take one of those signals and use it for the VSS signal. Maybe the non-ABS speedo signal would work, I don't know how many pulses per revolution the ford VSS has.

Greg