How many here had transmission problems?

Are you including sensor problems or just internal problems. 4 speeds only??

The transmission I am looking at is 4 speed and I preffer internal problems.

A couple years ago we bought a used 1995 T&C, the seller had replaced the transmission with a rebuilt 6 months prior.

Last year I bought a used 1994 T&C with a shot transmission and I replaced it with a rebuild. The sun gear in it had broken.

Both vans are still running strong.

These transmissions will grenade if you do stupid stuff like burnies in the parking lot, or spin wheels on ice or on gravel, or spin wheels trying to get out of mud or sand. The old trick of rocking the vehicle back and forth while shifting quickly into forward and reverse to try to get out of the mud is almost a guarenteed way to break them.

The 3.8L engine has enough low end torque to chirp tires if you stomp on it off the line. I am sure if you were to do that more than a few times you would probably break the transmission as well.

People have burned up their 4 speeds by bolting on a trailer hitch and neglecting to add a transmission cooler.

Basically these transmissions are fine if you use the van for it's intended purpose - to ferry around people - and you drive on pavement and drive at normal speeds and with moderate inputs. They will not last if you are the type that likes to sleep through the alarm clock then screech down the road at 100Mph to get to work on time, or your the type that takes weekly trips to Home Depot and loads up on 30-40 sheets of plywood, or you want a vehicle to tow your 25 foot ski boat to the lake every holiday. The problem is that the minivan is small enough to be used as a daily driver for Mom+kids, yet has enough carrying capacity to substitute for a full sized van or a truck, in a pinch. So people try to press them into all sorts of uses, some of which they really shouldn't be doing.

Ted

Well, any time any manufacturer you can have a transmission failure. The question to ask is how many transmission failures have there been on dodge

2002 caravans with 90k or more miles that have been properly maintained and driven properly? Have you had your transmission flushed every 2 years or 30k miles? Do you ALWAYS drive it properly; no stomping on the gas, no suddebn starts, do you always ease up through the gears, do you tow, check the fluid condition every month and do you every 30k have the bands inspected and adjusted when needed? Even if you do everything correctly there are no guarantees and in todays markey 90k is the average when a automatic transmission requires work. Coasty

On an '87 Voyager, no problems in six years, 120K miles.

On a '93 T & C replaced the transmission three times in 90K miles. Wifes car, she drives conservatively and the vehicle was never used to tow.

On '99 T & C, one problem only with the speed sensor at about 40K miles. However, van has 130K miles on it now and it has started to hard downshift when put under load to pick up second range. Noticeable clunk. no problems upshifting throughout the ranges nor dowshifting to a stop. Borrowed Time?

Frank

Just to put some things in order: It is a single driver car 99% of the time (no extra load, no towing and no tire burning). It had regular maintenance in a dealership. Transmission oil replaced a few times during the time I own it. As far as I can tell (and my Toyota has more then 190K miles on it with no problems) I drive on the conservative side.

What does it matter? The selection of people on this forum is not scientific, nor is your poll, so whatever answers you'd get would amount to nothing more than useless anecdotes. You've got a transmission problem

-- you need to work towards a satisfactory solution.

I have a 94 GC. I am the 3rd Owner. First 2 owners were related. A lady purchased it, drove it for a couple years, and sold it to her sister. I purchased the van with about 127,000 km on it. The trans went to hell at about 130,000 km (damn it). The rebuild was not done properly and started to fail (bad shudder) at 149,500 (500km short of the 20,000km warranty and 3 days short of the 1 year time limt! :)))))

The shop begrudgingly rebuilt it a second time. Now approaching

190,000 km and 2 years later. A couple of m>Just a simple poll (after my 2002 caravan with 90K miles lost reverse). >Thank You >

It is not so much the absuloute strength of the parts. What makes the difference is the rate of change of force applied. That is, if you put a huge amount of force suddenly on parts, then the high rate of change of the force causes undue stress and sheer on the parts. The stress and strain applied over and over will distort parts and cause premature wear, and premature failure.

An instantaneous torque applied suddenly to the parts may well create an instantaneous force much higher than the steady state force - a force that is well beyond the normal operating limits.

I liken it to stereos. You can have an amplifier in a system with a 10 watt per channel rating. If you listen to the music quietly, it sounds ok. But if you turn it up, then it gets all distorted. The louder you turn it up, the worse it sounds - even though the AVERAGE power output may only be 5 watts per channel.

Now hook up an amplifier that is rated for 400 watts per channel. And set the volume so the average power output is 5 watts per channel. The difference is astounding! It sounds clear and powerful. Why? Because it can handle the transient power bursts without distortion!

At 5 watts, a 10 watt rated amplifier has 3 dB of headroom. But at 5 watts, a 400 watt amplifier had over 18 dB of headroom.

So which amplifier would you chose?

Since we have no option with respect to the design of the tranmission, or swapping in a more rugged model, then we are forced to adapt our driving habits to align with that which the design engineers had in mind when this puppy was on the drawing board - or pay the price for not doing so.

I recall a test that was done on the freeway here a few years back. The government applied a coating to the pavement. The coating was designed to extend the service life of the asphalt, and thereby reduce long-term maintenance costs. The first rain we had there were seven multi-car pile-ups on this 2 mile stretch in less than 2 hours. They tried to explain it away as a random coincidence. Until the next time it rained and there were 4 mvas in 90 minutes. This continued on for over a month until finally the public outcry was so huge that they had to strip that section of highway and repave it with fresh asphalt.

The company that made the coating said tha if people had been driving the speed limit and driving defensively as their test drivers had been doing that there would have been no problems.

Well I guess it looked good on paper. But the underlieing assumptions of the coating company were grossly flawed as well as naive. People speed in rush hour, period. And police cannot stop them. If they did, then it would be the rush 24 hours, not the rush hour! And as for driving defensively?? Heck some of the immagrants they let into this country cannot even read or speak english, never mind french. How do you expect them to understand the concept of driving defensively? Ever seen how they drive in some other countries? It is a miracle that people were not killed in this "test" of the coating.

I feel much the same about the A604. It was NOT properly engineered from the start. NO WAY was enough time spend testing it to make sure that it was robust. Either that, or Chrysler KNEW it was no good, and shipped it anyway.

Years later, it is a little bit better. But the A604 and the 41te really need to be redesigned to be workhorses. Vans, even m>Ted said,

Agreed and that the cause of part failure in any mechanical equipment is the failure of the film strength between the sheer area of the moving parts. Sudden starts and hard acceleration causes severe stress on the lubricant between the parts breaking the film strength and allowing the metal parts to touch causing wear. This is why synthetic lubricants are far superior they have hundred times the film strength greater than non-synthetic lubricants. Coasty

I'm no lubrication expert, but 100 times greater? Sounds incredible. Can you site a credible source for that?

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

Pat Goss from Goss'e Garage writer for Motor Week he just was talking about sheer strength this weekend on his weekly radio show. Coasty

Was Mr. Goss speaking informally, or was it really meant to be a tchnically accurate statement? I'd really like to see some numbers. I understand that synthetic is better in most respects than non-synth. But for two "materials" so similar, I find claims of any property of one more than 2 or 3 times that of the other to be suspect. While it may be possible, it just sounds like one of those things that get stated by some expert or other (who may or may not have a vested interest in exaggerating the benefits and creating another street myth) as an off the cuff remark and then accepted as fact without question. A quick Google search turned up only very broad statements like "Synthetic oil has higher shear strength than non-synthetic", but no quantified parametrics are ever given in those statements (many of which are from marketers of synthetic oil products) (will take a closer look later when I have time, but so far no numbers to back up a claim of 100 times).

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

This would only work if the drivetrain was perfect and had zero slop in it. This is impossible in a production vehicle. All drivetrains have slop in component tolerances and those add up, as a result the drivetrain has a certain "elasticity" When you stomp on the gas the engine starts turning very fast, and it compresses the elasticity in the drivetrain, and when the drivetrain is fully compressed and full power can finally be applied, the parts of the drivetrain like the engine have built up a certain amount of inertia. When compression is at zero, then not only does the full power of the engine get applied, but also the stored kenetic energy of the engine and drivetrain inertia gets dumped into the transmission, and if the build up of power was very fast the instantaneous amount of envergy dumped into the transmission is an order of magnititude higher than what the engine can produce.

Take a rubber band, put it against your skin, pull it back gently, let it go. Now, push on your skin the same pressure and time as it took to pull back the rubber band. Which action delivered more energy to your skin, ie: which hurt more?

Ted

OK - I did get some time to do some research today. Here's what I came up with: Shear strength is meaningless when talking about a liquid like oil. Shear strength is a measure of the force that it takes to shear (change the shape of) a glob of grease.

From

"Shear strength is the maximum shear stress that is possible to transmit through a grease without the onset of grease flow. Grease being a semi-solid material can transmit a shear stress also with the shear strain rate zero. The shear strain rate zero grease can be kept on different surfaces of bearings and housings. This is an important parameter when pumping greases through pipes in a centralised lubricating system."

If Mr. Goss used the term 'shear strength' in talking about oil, then that is a good indication that he is just repeating something he heard with nothing to back it up (again - because it is a meaningless term when speaking of liquids). Interestingly, many of the Google hits that I got were sites advertising Amsoil distributorships that misused the "shear strength" term. So it's a good bet that that's where the technically incorrect usage has come from, including that of Mr. Goss (possibly indirectly).

The parameter that maybe he thought he was talking about is 'shear stability', which is applicable to liquids/oils. It is the change in viscosity after a prescribed time under prescribed conditions during which continuous shearing of the oil is done.

From

"Synth Oils do not rely as much on special Viscosity Index Improver additives and will experience little permanent viscosity loss.

"The shear stability of an oil is measured by using both ASTM test methods D445 and D5275. First, the viscosity of an engine oil is measured. Then, the oil is exposed to severe shearing conditions by repeatedly pumping it through a specially-sized diesel fuel injection nozzle at high pressure. After shearing the oil, its viscosity is measured again. The percentage of viscosity lost is determined by comparing the second viscosity measurement with the original viscosity measurement."

I couldn't find any sites that gave quantitative comparitive results of shear stability tests between known/popular brands of synthetic and non-synthetic oils.

If you do come across such data, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

Bill Putney wrote:

#1 Killer of these transmissions. I was working at a Toyota dealer, and had the filter in my LHS changed and the tranny topped off.

They topped it off with "All Purpose" tranny fliud. The next day I made them drain the whole tranny and refill it with +3. I always keep at least one bottle of +3 in the LHS and my van, since if you get stuck somewhere a lot of 'gas stations' (read:Convenience Stores) don't carry it.