I have a 99 ES300 with approximately 96k. Recently it quit pulling in all forward gears. (U140E Trans) Not willing to fork over $2900 to the dealership for a reman I pulled the trans out and took a look since in my previous life I did a good bit of trans work. What I have found is the the forward planet gear set came apart damaging close to $3K worth of hard parts (4 pieces). While I have seen failures like this before they are fairly rare and I certainly didn't expect to see it in a Toyota with less that 100K. Has anyone else seen this kind of failure in a U140E and is it typical for this transmission. I have scrapped my plans to rebuild even though I am already $400 worth of parts into it and have ordered a Used Trans with 21K miles. I am curious about the quality of this particular transmission type now. Has anybody heard of these new Toyota transmissions being prone to catastrophic failures like this?
99 Lexus ES300 U140E Tranny dead
Sep 06, 2005
1 Replies
A friend had a problem with the transmission on his '96 Camry with 150k miles. I don't know what actually broke but the fix was a replacement transmission. He was not very meticulous about changing transmission fluid and he has a habit of changing from forward to reverse and vice versa before the car came to a complete stop, so I thought those factors contributed to the short life span.
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