Was doing some research for a friend because his Acura TSX 6MT totally crapped out on him and the dealership is blaming him of hot-rodding it around town and thats why it failed. Was just wondering how many other cases their were out there because their trying to point fingers instead of recognizing it coulda been the car. It crapped out at about 10k miles on the car and no he didnt Hot-Rod it or do anything to cause the clutch to burn out.

 

Try searching around this forum, you will find a lot of useful information about the 6MT failures, as sadly others have had the same problem.

 

Did his have a mettalic fluid coming from the tranny case?

Thats what happened with the other three I've read about.

 

Do we now have enough examples to consider this an "issue" on the 6MT. Or would that still be jumping the gun?

 

well, 18,000+ cars sold and i've heard of 7 transmission problems 5 for 6mt and 2 for 5at so i don't think we have an epandemic on our hands yet.

 

of those 7 problems how many weren't from abuse/etc?

 

18000+ cars sold yes, but how many of those people would post to this site. And how many of those cars sold have over 10k on them. I'm not suggesting its a common problem, only that it may deserve some attention.

BTW, where have you heard of AT's going? I havent seen anyone on this site have their AT fail.

 

This conversation goes in circles. I don't think anybody has a good idea of how many people actually post to these sites. The root cause of even random defects should be determinable (is that a word?). I don't drive my TSX hard at all (well, maybe once every month or two), so I will be quite pissed off if my tranny died.

 

usually when something bad happens... it get's posted and not ignored... so you probably heard about all the cases that have happened in NA.

also... the lack of follow up information lends me to believe that not everybody posting here is being honest.

 

Hes going to see a customer Rep today and talk about it. I have no idea about the metallic fluid coming from the tranny. He didnt do anythign out of the norm to make that clutch die im pretty positive.

 

My AT failed, check my post.http://www.acura-tsx.com/forums/show...&threadid=6275

 

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/p...laintsearch.cfm

Make : ACURA Model : TSX Year : 2004
Crash : No Fire : No Number of Injuries: 0
ODI ID Number : 10051870 Date of Failure: December 15, 2003
Component: POWER TRAIN:AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION

Summary:
WHILE PROCEEDING TO ENTER THE INTERSTATE TRANSMISSION FAILED, CAUSING THE DRIVER TO PULL OFF THE HIGHWAY. THE DRIVER HAD THE VEHICLE TOWED TO THE DEALER. *AK

 

20k miles on my 6 MT and no problems yet...

 

I don't know dan. 7 trannies have died from this site. 18,000 cars have been sold but only 136 owners post to this site according to the owners thread. 7 out of 136 is about 1 out of every 19 to 20 cars. That does sound like an epidemic to me.

 

At first I dismissed the tranny problems, but there have been enough cases reported here that if true, would qualify as a serious problem. I don't think anyone can discount the fact that there have been five or so problems reported out of 200 or so cars (conservative estimates). Thats a failure rate that is way too high. Having said that, I am not concerned and I won't care if I problems develop as long as they take care of them. I have 16,000 miles now and nary a problem.

 

There's no way it's 1 in 20 cars! If so, 900 cars would have been in the dealer having a $4K+ warranty repair done totaling at least $3.6 million in repairs for Acura. Acura would have recalled the TSX long ago if they knew that they were going to lose $4K for every 20 cars they made.

Further, if the failure rate is 1:20 in year one, what is it going to be by year two or three? 1:8?

 

How would they lose money by not recalling? By recalling they would have to repair every TSX, whereas by not recalling they just repair the ones that fail. Look how long Acura waited before admitting there was a problem with the TL trannies and recalling....WAY too long.

 

Acura would have a much better chance at recovering money from their vendor by having a recall now than three years down the road.

 

Besides how many dealerships would try to convince the owner that it was their fault. Every incident here the dealship has blamed the owner.

 

Doesn't Honda build it's transmissions in house? (We may hear about some Honda engineer committing ritual seppuku at some point.)

Do the math. Honda is much better off dragging their heels on this, even if the failure rate is 5% annually.

 

Guys, I stand corrected....

I was talking to my contact at Getrag at the Sterling Heights MI plant about this thread yesterday and according to him the industry standard for transmission failures in passenger cars is around 2.5% for AT, 3% for SMG, and 2.25% for MT. So it seems that Honda isn't too far off this number.

Just a little back-story, the company I work for has done parts for Getrag in the past and we were asked to quote parts for the M3 SMG transmission however we didn't get that package.

 

if you ask me, a clutch failure can only be caused by riding the clutch or improper driving. its too simple and basic in it's operation to say it was a manufacturers defect. the only things that could cause that is a weak pressure plate spring or perhaps somthing binding up to not allow the clutch to fully engage, i suspect someones foot riding the clutch or using it as a brake on a hill to prevent the car from rolling.

as for metal flakes in the transmission. it could be a bearning failure or a syncro failure but these types of things would take a while to develop a problem. i really don't see a car with such low miles on it develop this problem all on it's own when so many cars are running around fine with no problems.
if someone was shifting wierd and burning up syncros or doing somthing really bad while hot rodding the car i can see a trans failure.
bottom line is before i heard about these problems i would have said that manuel transmissions are far less maintenence than AT just because of the simplicity of MT. but i never factored in driver abuse.
for an AT i can see premature failure of many components, the only thing a driver can do to really abuse an AT is to do a neutral drop or just drive the piss out of the car. neutral drops are very unlikely because people who buy cars usually dont want to damage it.
driving like a bat out of hell is another story but is far less likely to damage the transmission. i could much more easily blame an AT failure to be a manufacturers defect than a MT.

 

I somehow doubt that the 2.25% for MT vs. 2.5% for AT is an apples to apples comparison. The simple fact that an AT has way more parts/complexity with much more potential for failure would suggest a much larger diff in failure rate. The real big diff in the two is that an MT clutch is supposed to wear out after a while but that's not really part of the tranny. If you compare just the tranny (forget about the clutch in MT and torque converter in AT) I'd bet the diff would be much larger and failure rate be much smaller for MT.
When trying to achieve some sort of ratio of failures out of total sales remember that the MT equiped TSX is a small % of total number. So although we might be up to 22,000 sold this month, the number of MTs sold is probably only a few thousand.
You have to seperate the real tranny failures from the clutch probs (which are probably abuse related) and then see if there's a pattern.

 

I see your point Biker. I was just trying to say that the industry norm is that for every 10,000 MT jtransmissions sold 225 will have some sort of component failure and for every 10,000 AT transmissions sold 250 will have a component failure. I don't know what the split is for the TSX but it's entirely possible that there might be a much higher failure rate than the standard if only 10% of TSX's have the 6MT.

 

sorry..... my i ask what is neutral drops?

thanks a lot!!!

 

put car in neutral.

rev up

put car into drive while revs are still up


painfull for the car

 

It's a quick way to be one of the people that have a bad tranny.

It should never be done!