I've read about many tranny failures on this car and I have to say it has piqued my interest a bit (I suppose because I have one!). I had a 94 Tbird before my TL which required 3 tranny overhauls by the time I hit 50k miles (bought it new in 94) but I knew what the problem was - a poor torque converter design by Ford and also a bad MLP switch. On the last tranny repair to the bird, the dealer finally put in a new design torque converter and I was fine after that. Anyway, my point is that I have never heard any details about what exactly fails on the TL trannies and what the target mileage for failure is. Maybe this is because the dealer usually swaps out the entire tranny on these cars rather than repairing them and most of these are done under warranty so there is not a lot of discussion possibly like when you get hit with a $2500 repair bill. So - does anyone know what it is that fails on these trannies and if there is a target mileage range that they fail in - 10k, 15k, 20k? I suppose I am wondering if the failure is due to improper assemby of some of the units or if its a design/engineering problem, etc. It's not that I want to break mine down and repair it or anything (it's not broken BTW) - I just think it would be interesting to know what it is that breaks on these trannies and if you hit a certain mileage with no failure are you then out of the woods so to speak (wishful thinking I suppose).

 

Hmm...from what I've read here in the posts, nobody has been able to figure out what exactly causes the trannys to go bad. Also, people at different mileage intervals are having failures...one theory is that maybe there was just a bad batch of trannys released in our TLs. If anyone needs to have their tranny replaced, please ask the dealer exactly what caused the problem. Thanks!

 

Try doing a search, but i remember hearing something about a bad solenoid.