Ours was the AWD version which cut the milage down some and the mountains were back roads in WV. We replaced it with a 2001 Impala and I just changed the brakes and rotors for the first time at 75K.
Ah, AWD will take a hit in gas mileage. Still, the brake service interval you experiences seems very odd to me.
I hear the Impala with the 3.8 engine pulls better real-world gas mileage than one with the 3.4 engine.
The main problem is the chrysler transmission won't let you downshift on long downhill grades, you shift down out of overdrive and eventually it goes back in so you have to ride the brakes.
The 3.8 engines are incredible, IMHO. My '96 Bonnie with the supercharged version of the 3800 Series II, get's better gas mileage then my sister's
3400.
Wow, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Is there a wire you could snip? Probably not, it's probably programmed into the computer that controls the tranny. I'd rather ruin a tranny than overheat the brakes and plunge off a cliff. But a good tranny should allow downshifting with no damage, and not too much more wear on the tranny.
Its not that it wouldn't allow downshifting, you could downshift but it would eventually ignore the selector and upshift. The first trip with that van when we got into town after going down that mountain I had to stand both feet on the brake pedal to get it to stop. Checked with the dealer later and it was even documented in the manual that this is a feature. That wasn't the only problem, the AWD made by AUDI was slow to engage so you would get front wheel slip, then the back end would engage and if you hadn't let off the gas by then the back wheels would start pushing and front end having already broke traction would slide sideways. Then sometimes when you would be backing out of a driveway or parking space the AWD would bind up and release with a bang, I thought I backed into something the first time. Then the electrical parts that were subcontracted out to Mitsubishi were so cheap the engine would just shut off while driving down the road. I paid a lot of $ trying to get that fixed both in warranty deductable and after the warranty ran out. I finally found it cheaper to just swap parts myself and it ended up being bad connectors for the crank and cam sensors. If you were to take a look at them you see that they don't have the normal rubber seal around the outside of the connectors so they would get a bit of water inside and it would cause the resistance of the pins to go up. I kept a can of WD40 to spray in when if would quit and not want to start and would put in a little dielectric grease every so often trying to keep the water out. There were other problems but I've written enough. The basic minivan design isn't all that great, you take a front wheel drive car and stretch it out adding more weight high up. Everyone makes a big deal about SUV's rolling over but since traditional SUV's have a frame and more parts to the drivetrain down low their CG is lower than a minivan so they are actually not as bad as the media made them out to be. The minivan was very top heavy with too soft of suspension, I had to drive real slow around curves because it would lean over a lot. On PA highways where they cut the expansion joints all the way through and then the concrete sections shift a little bit you get that constant bump bump, bump, bump, the minivan wold make us seasick if we tried to drive 65 as it would start rocking back and forth with the shifting of the highway sections.
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