While numerous drinks deep on my returning flight last night after a meeting, I got to thinking about the concern over the transaxles’ durability.

Many people now state that we have a weak transaxle and by some of the more recent failures I started to believe it. And then I thought about my situation, I have flogged the car hard, several mountain pass runs that ran the car from 1st to 3rd hundreds of times in the couple hours of hard driving. With about 18k on it and solely using SS (except when cruising on the highway using cruise control) I have yet to have an incident or even symptoms of problems. I do also have mods, intake, pulleys and headers.

Maybe I have been lucky and so have other hard drivers or is this idea of being weak incorrect.

When a component is weak, which implies that it cannot take much stress without failing. If that were the case, we would have a much higher number of failures mentioned here since most people here are enthusiast modding and driving their cars a bit harder than the norm. That adds stress and should induce a failure.

So what is the problem, are their manufacturing quality issues that let some weaker transaxles get by and into so vehicles. By the looks of it, this seems to be the case. ~1% may not be made correctly causing them to fail prematurely. Then others may be stout enough to handle added power and stress from hard driving.

So in the end we may not have a weak transaxle but poor quality control on the manufacturing of the unit. Just a thought...

But, I would like to hear from those who have had failures what the failure was. This could help determine where the problem does stem from.

 

This sounds like a very likely possibility. If so, I hope my new tranny is one of the "strong" ones.

It's true that if we actually had weak trannies many more would be giving out, especially from people on this forum. People like mchtypes, with extensive mods, seem to be doing fine with their trannies, so there must be some stronger ones.

Also, it seems as though the problems may lie in the electronics of the tranny, I guess, since many reports blame the problems on the transmission shifting solenoid. I had my solenoid replaced after the computer gave a code for this, but after test driving it, the dealer decided that a new tranny was needed.

[ 07-13-2001: Message edited by: Rod ]

 

Hello Rod, I agree that the problem may be electronic related for the most part. Solenoid or similar failures can induce mechanicals issues.

I hope to hear from others on this mater. But unfortunately it seems that this forum seems to be more self-motivated and self-fulfilling than to actually have more dialog on topics that deal with the subject vehicle.

I could care less about what color is best, what someone should do about a ticket, what cell phone of radar detector is best, etc. (BTW, not knocking the topics, but it is not in my interest).

Any chance of having a separate 'technical' discussion forum. I am more interested in what makes the car tick and what deficiencies we may have to over come.

Many might say, "why not go out and buy a faster vehicle". True, but why make it easy on your self?? Why drive the same vehicle that others buy from the show room?? This is never gonna be the speed demon (that is what project cars are for...) But a daily driven sleeper is very nice to have...

 

Well said Scalbert. I too would like to have a Technical forum where we can discuss the mechanical aspects of the car.