My transmission in my 93 Dodge Grand Caravan died two days ago. I guess I am fortunate as I was able to get 140+ K miles out of it. Well, since the van had over 203K miles on it, I just dropped it off at Goodwill. Now I am in the market for a replacement van. Can anyone advise as to whether or not ChryCo has resolved the tranny problems for 2003 and newer minivans? I would like to consider the ChryCo vans but only if I can be reasonabley assured that they tranny won't die as soon as it goes out of warranty.
As long as you immediately put an auxilliary transmission cooler on it, for those years and later your fine. Make sure to have a flud change done on it if you buy a used one.
I listen to a program called Goss's Garage, Pat Goss is probably the best mechanic in the US writes for Motor Week for many years. Many questions about automatic transmissions are asked on his show each week. The majority of the transmission problems are caused by the drivers driving habits and non-maintenance yes there were some bad ones too but I am speaking for the majority of the problems.
First one of the major killers of a modern transmission is the lead foot. People have a tendency to stomp it and rabbit off the line this is one of the worst things you can do. You should gradually accelerate doing so will extend the transmission life.
Once a year or 30k miles have a complete fluid flush and filter change using the correct fluid. Some of the shops including AAMCO have installed the wrong fluid especially in Chryslers. Climate and use has a lot to do with transmission life along with load and towing of a vehicle.
Pat has stated that getting 60K miles out of a transmission is not uncommon for any manufacturer before it needs an overhaul or replacement. It is all how it is used or abused and maintained.
I would change that sentence to read as follows: "Some of the shops including AAMCO almost always (98% of the time) install the wrong fluid especially in Chryslers".
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
Yep, agree with you a 100%, my wife has a 94 shadow her work car, an automatic with a 150K on the tranny. I flush, change the fluid and filter myself and yes I do a true flush. I check the bands at each change mike and adjust as needed.
hmmm. If he is "the best" I wonder why his shop was unable to solve the vibration problem that I had with my Porsche 944. In fact they pretty much told me that they were unable to feel the vibration I was describing and pretty much suggested that I take the car somewhere else if I wanted to have it fixed. They also stated that they flat out wouldn't drive the car over the posted speed limit; now the vibration becomes really pronounced around 75-80 MPH but is certainly evident at speeds as low as 50 MPH. In their defense I will say that they did the best darn tire balance and alignment job I've ever had, but it certainly wasn't cheap. (Goss' Garage really exists; it's about 2 miles from my house, and I took my car there based on a) the inability of a local Porsche shop to find the issue b) it was the closest decent-appearing shop to my house and c) the assumption that name recognition = better service)
I'm going to drop the car off tonight at a shop I used to use years ago when I drove pretty much exclusively Volkswagens; hopefully this time it'll all work out.
Now I'm not trying to "slam" Pat, by all accounts he is a pretty darn good mechanic, I just would hesitate to use words like "best." That said his advice in this case seems sound and also make sure you use the factory recommended fluid.
Since his advice is nothing more than a rehash of what is said everywhere, I don't see that he's offering anything helpful.
Frankly, this business of 'stomping on it off the line" also merits a mention. The majority of men drivers do that, and want to do that, and the automakers know it, and design the transmissions for it. I'd say that 60K of life out of a transmission that was regularly "stomped off the line" is more accurate, if Pat thinks that
60K is average lifespan, then he should be saying nothing about stomping off the line. All the examples of transmissons I've seen that got the
150K-200K mileage are from women who were nonagressive drivers, or old people who choose to drive slow. And would you like to be the driver -behind- drivers like that? I don't!
Nate, a suggestion to you if the VW place can't fix the vibration. Find a speed shop somewhere and put your Porche on a dyno. If there's no vibration when the car is spinning up to 70Mph then you know it's likely a frame misalignment problem, or non-driven suspension issue. If the vibration is present you know it's in the powertrain.
I cried (!) when I totalled our '87 Reliant at about 250,000 km. The tranny was great. I had a new camshaft and the engine ran great.
Our 82 Voyager tranny dies at over 200,000 km. A rebuild (by me and a CC mechanic - former high school student of mine) and a rebuilt torque converter and away it goes. $500 for a TOTAL rebuild - including the differential, etc.
Not a race car so treat it (your vehicle) appropriately. Keep the maintenance up to "severe" standards. Change fluids and filters TOTALLY and regularly.
Perhaps you should be flying an airplane - OR living in a place that will screw you around with fuel prices TRIPLE to what you are paying right now!! GET real.
I won't go into the REAL vehicle maintenance costs in those parts of the "modern" world.
The USA is living in a "fools paradise" as far as vehicles are concerned, just because you "can". I really wonder how you can justify such "combative' driving behaviour on your roads when you will "save" a few seconds. save a few seconds for what?? To go to Wal-Mart or to the local pub? Not exactly an emergency. Just because "you want to"????
No wonder few non- North Americans bother responding (or reading) to this news group!!
Well I will comment that the population and population density in Canada is much lower than the US, so with more wide open spaces and fewer people you do not have the crowding problems on the roads there that are common in the US. So as they say, you should talk.
But I think your wrong on that 'because we can' statement.
The cities in North America specifically the US have a big problem that cities in most countries in the world do not have - they are all very young, as a result most of them do not have the population density of a city in Europe. Also there's a lot more open spaces in the US, I think many Europeans forget this a lot.
As a result of the lower density, particularly in Western areas of the US, mass-transit is a losing proposition, and simply does not appeal to most city residents.
If you go to the oldest cities in the US, such as New York, you will find an extensive mass-transit system that the city is utterly dependent on, and in those cities people live much like in Europe, where they ride the train or subway or bus. Because these older cities grew before the advent of machine-powered transportation, living long distances away was impractcal and property values forced building to become very dense.
But in the young cities, those have sprawled out rather than growing vertically. To support sprawl of this magnitude you have to have a huge number of roads to get around, and a huge number of cars.
City planners in many states today recognize this but in order to force vertical growth this requires restrictions on private property ownership and what you can do with it. That is of course inherently unfair because you have lots of situations where an existing building that was built in a sprawling fashion 40 years ago with no restrictions, might be next to a plot of land that was never developed, so today your trying to tell the property owners that want to develop it today, that they cannot develop it in the same sprawling fashion their neighbors did. And the more effective these restrictions at forcing vertical growth, the more onerous, and the more pressure and support for rejecting them entirely by the general public.
This also has a very bad effect on the practice of issuing licensing. In a country that has effective mass-transit, you can weed out the drivers that display the kind of obstructive and dangerous driving that I'm referring to. When a driver insists on going 40Mph in a
55Mph zone, the police in such a country will ticket, and if the driver doesen't get the message and keeps getting tickets, he or she loses his license.
However in a country that does not have effective mass-transit there is little political support for pulling drivers licenses. For example just look at the travesty of drunk driving, in the United States if you get busted for drunk driving, you won't permanently lose your license. In some states people that get busted for DUII have racked up 6 or 7 of these convictions until the day comes that they paste some poor innocent person, and then all the sudden there's support for pulling their licensing. As a result of this, police in the US very very rarely issue tickets for obstructive driving even though there's lots and lots of examples. And it is almost impossible to get an older persons license pulled for medical reasons, even when the family of the older person all are demanding it, if the older driver fights it. There's people a hairs breath away from being legally blind who have drivers licenses. And very few states require periodic retesting - they will continue to renew drivers licenses year after year without ever calling someone in for a test. You could be a 10 year quadrapalegic with a valid drivers license in some cases.
And even when they do pull licenses, the penalties for driving without one are mild.
All of this is because since there's not effective mass-transit, pulling someone's drivers license in most cases effectively puts them in the poorhouse.
There are a lot of people in the US who would like to change this but your dealing with massive social inertia. It will take hundreds of years to change these things.
It isn't a few seconds, if it was, nobody would drive agressively. It is many minutes. If for example I did not execute passes of drivers that were going slower than the prevailing traffic on my work commute, I would add a minimum of 15 minutes of travel time EACH WAY. I know this for a fact because I've timed it a few times when I was driving on a slipping clutch that needed replacement, and I was feather-footing it in order to delay having to fix the vehicle. This is probably because I'm driving a 40 mile round-trip commute every day.
Drivers in the US fall on a bell curve in my observation. About 50% of them get onto the road and go into 'autopilot' mode where they drive what the prevailing traffic drives. You can see them listening to music and playing with their ipods, talking on the cell phone, yelling at their kids, or just zoning out as they drive down the road. Of the remaining,
25% drive agressively faster than the prevailing traffic, and about
25% of them drive obstructively slower, which 90% of the time means they drive exactly the speed limit, no more.
Of the agressive ones, the top 20% of those are reckless and the police pick them off for speeding with regularity, about 20% of them are expert drivers and they know exactly when it's safe to speed and how to speed so they never get caught, and the remainders are just bad drivers who get picked up for speeding every 2--3 years, usually when the cops need to temporairly increase revenue by doing a round of increased enforcement.
Of the obstructive ones, about 20% of those are doing it because they are making a political statement - being deliberately obstructive in order to try to slow down traffic. Another 20% are criminals driving with suspended or no licenses, or drunks, and they are paranoid about getting pulled over, and the reminders are just plain bad drivers who have zero common sense enough to understand they are causing a hazard on the road.
Since your interested in the justifications of the agressive drivers, well as you can see 80% of them just plain don't have any, just like 80% of the obstructive drivers just don't have any valid justifications either. But of the 20% expert agressive drivers, the justification is simple - the road can carry only a certain number of cars, and the more rapidly you get onto the road, do your business, and get off of the road, the more space there is for other people to be on the road. If it wasn't for the 20% agressive expert drivers, everyone in traffic would be spending even longer in gridlock during the rush hour, with no increase in safety.
Or some of them are driving cars that have a problem and going another
20 mph just might incapacitate the car. Or some people cannot process the road that clearly, especially at night, that is, night vision problems. Sure they should not drive but who else is going to pay their bills if they cannot get up and back from work?
Are you sure about that above paragraph? Or is that a rationalization to drive aggressively? You might be right but I would like to see a reference or some logic applied to a transportation network. I doubt what you are saying because in gridlock no one is really moving. So how can faster aggressive drivers reduce the load? In my experience, aggressive or bad drivers cause a great deal of gridlock. When I sat on the highway, not moving for one to two hours, literally stuck in place, it was due to idiots having accidents. The idiot was probably trying to mimic the aggressive drivers but without the concommitant skill set. The last time was a woman driving an SUV. She was turned completely around facing the traffic in the passing lane, obviously dazed, and semi-conscious at best with her daughters in the back seat, saying mommy, mommy, over and over. Everyone passed her, oblivious to her plight, probably because they were annoyed at her for causing a massive stoppage for about an hour in heavy traffic. Never seen anything like that before or since. I did not see what happened but this was a toll road, two lanes, with no exits or entrances or opposing traffic where this happened. I can only guess she tried to pass and turned too quickly and spun her SUV around. This occurred on a summer's day, perfectly clear weather. Very strange.
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