As a result of raised awareness regarding the proliferation of individual OEM-recommended ATFs, and discussion in various forums regarding the possibility of "universal" service fill fluids, it was decided to study how divergent individual OEM requirements actually are by comparing the fluids performance in industry standard tests.

A bench-mark study was carried out to compare the performance of various OEM automatic transmission fluids in selected industry standard tests. All of the fluids evaluated in the study are used by certain OEMs for both factory and service fill. The areas evaluated included friction durability, oxidation resistance, viscosity stability, aeration and foam control. The results of this study are discussed in this paper. Based on the results, one can conclude that each ATF is uniquely formulated to specific OEM requirements. In addition, the results show that a customer should not deviate from the automatic transmission fluid specified in the vehicle's owners manual.