My wife's '03 VDC spewed differential fluid out of the front differential, thankfully only 20 miles into her cross country trip. She took it to a nearby lube outfit who were able to tell her that the transmission fluid was OK, but the differential was down. They topped it up enough to allow her to hobble home. Now we need to take it to our dealer, and I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with this kind of problem? The vehicle has about 48K miles on it, and I don't know of any prior transmission/CV/differential problems with it. We've had it since it had about 28K miles, so we have some history with the vehicle.
We had a '98 that had the bad CV grease problem, which was misdiagnosed by (another) dealer as bad seals, so they replaced the seals and somehow managed to trash the entire transmission. Subaru paid for that screw-up, so naturally we are a bit nervous to take the vehicle to Subaru for assistance. Our current dealer took 3 or 4 tries to diagnose an electrical problem that was causing problems with the fuel injection under some conditions, so I think we are justifiably anxious about trusting them to resolve this problem prior to a major trip across country. Is there a better place than a Subaru dealer to work with?
Thanks in advance,
-- Larry Gadallah Sammamish, WA