The service manager at my dealership told me today that there are 28 people ahead of me on the national list waiting for a new transmission. That seems like quite a few people. When you consider that most people that have a TLS probably don' t have more than 8000 miles on their car and that the tranny failure usually seems to occur after 8000 miles, that seems like a lot of bad trannies. Plus that fact that whatever surplus of transmission had been in inventory has been used up and many people have already had theirs replaced.

When I first had my transmission problems, no one on this board with TLS had experienced trouble. Now it seems there's a new one every week. I think as time goes by, we'll see more and more problems.

 

I dunno, I hear different. I went to the dealer and he said he replaced a tranny on a TL a week ago and it only took two days to get the tranny in.

Either my dealer is full of it, OR you should try a new dealer... I just havent heard about that many tranny problems. Maybe 5% are having problems, plus you have to remember most CLS have been out over a year and they are getting a 2% rate... I still think thats very low...

Thats just me.
I dont think there is a need to alarm other people who are NOT having problems. Like me, I have 10k miles and im fine. Others on the CL board have 30k, and they are fine... so im just saying its not as bad as you think. IMO

 

Agreed!!! lets just play with some numbers. let's say nationwide there are about 600 transmissions that have been changed for cl's/tl's. Now lets guess the nationwide sales of both cars combine at 60,000 cars. Thats what 1%?!?! I bet the sales are alot higher then 60k too. im just guessing low for arguement sake. As for 600 trannies going out, i bet thats kinda high. IMO, I dont mean to make light of our fellow cl and tl owners problems but thats what i see. just my 2 cents

 

i mean if it is a tranny defect and they are as crappy as people think i would expect to see ALOT more bad trannies. somewhere in teh range of 1 out of 4. am i wrong?

 

I don't know. It seems like each dealer has its own story.

Mine called me yesterday to tell me that they would not be getting my tranny in until "the middle of December" at the earliest. He said that there is a large back order on TL-S trannys, and that they were held up to fix a "major problem". When pressed for specifics, he would not eleaborate any further.

The odd thing about this whole tranny situation is that the dealers do not act suprised about it. It's almost like they know something, but won't tell us. Even Wayne from PAA, while not getting specific, wrote like there was SOMETHING that was wrong, something that was amiss.

I asked my dealer if he expected more TL-S's to experience this problem, he just grinned and said "I hope not". It was not a happy grin.

So, not to be doom and gloom, I don't think that any TL-S owners should get neurotic about this, but I also think that we should not take this problem lightly, either.

:-jon

 

…and why don’t we all write a letter to Honda/Acura asking for explanation. If all of us on this board stand behind and sign that letter may be we can find out WTF is going on instead of trying to guess.

 

I've been waiting for a new tranny for 2 weeks now. I guess that means I'm probably number 20 something on the list. At least my dealer finally gave me their loaner car!! It's a 2001 TL. Not bad actually. I thought those were 4-speed auto. Nice to see they are 5-speeds.

 

Wait a minute, how many miles does your car have when the tranny gave out? Didn't you recently get it?

Who's fixing it, Rallye?

Man that sucks your tranny quit. I feel mine act weird only a couple of times Makes me worry

 

I had 8600 miles on my TL-S. I didn't buy it from Rallye. I bought it from Island Acura in Wantagh, LI.

The service manager is being as cordial as possible. I really don't have any complaints.

 

8600 miles -- that's almost exactly what I had when my first tranny went.

 

I don't think anyone would get a response in writing from Acura/Honda stating there is something wrong with the trannies, even if there was. It's all a matter of spin control. Let's run both scenarios:

1. For whatever reason, Acura has a bad or improperly designed transmission. They may know there is a problem but not specifically know *what* is causing the failures. If this was the case, sending you a letter saying, "we have a problem but we don't know why" makes them look like a bunch of idiots for (a) releasing a product that's defective and (b) not being able to figure out the problem. Also, putting anything in writing is dangerous from a liability standpoint. If they acknowledge a faulty part and don't do anything about, and someone gets into an accident as a result of that part failing, out comes the swarm of lawyers. Likewise, once it's an official press release, the media would have a field day with it. It would get posted in respected journals and until it got fixed, no one would be buying the cars. Car & Driver reviews would read "...a great car, but Acura admits to having faulty transmissions. We recommend staying away until the problem is fixed." Sales go into the $hitter.

2. On the other hand, they may know what's causing it but have specifically chosen *not* to do anything about it. Why? This, my friends, is bean counters at their best (or worst, depending on who's asking). I think someone here posted that it costs in the area of $6500 to replace a tranny. If Acura sends a letter to everyone saying, we think the trannies have a problem, what's going to happen? Everyone is going to want theirs replaced as a recall or warranty claim. $6500 X several hundred thousand cars = Big A$$ $$$$$$$$. Even with a design flaw, not everyone's transmission is going to fail. Counting 1999 models and newer, Acura has made well over 100,000 cars--probably several times that. If we've got 4,000 members (and not everyone here owns the car), that's 1/25 of a conservative estimate of car owners. And if we have ten people on here with dead or dying trannies, that's 1/250 trannies have a problem. This is being *way* conservative. The numbers are probably more in Acura's favor (like 1 in 1000 is bad). From a business standpoint, it is cheaper to replace the units one by one as they fail instead of replacing a *lot* of trannies that may never fail as a precaution. If you ran your business like that, you'd have to close up shop soon. For every one tranny that *doesn't* $hit the bed, that's $6500 more in Acura's pocket.

Does this bean counter control really happen? It sure does. Many of you are too young to remember the Ford Pinto disaster. For those of you lucky enough to have ridden in (or shamefully owned) a 1970s-era Ford Pinto, you will recall that the gas tank was located right behind the rear bumper, with no structural support at all. After several rear-end collisions that concluded with a fireball explosion and the deaths of the occupants of the cars, Ford conducted a quiet in-house study of the problem. Their engineers discovered the design was not only faulty, but downright dangerous. Even a relatively minor rear-end collision could rupture the fuel tank and cause a fire. Ford engineers claimed they wanted a recall to redesign the rear end of the Pinto. But redesigning a vehicle in mid-production is next to impossible and costs big $$$. Retrofitting existing cars with new bumpers and bladder-lined fuel tanks was also deemed too expensive. The Ford accountants did the math and figured out it would be far cheaper to settle out of court with families whose loved ones were either hurt or killed by the design flaw than to recall all the cars and make them safer (remember, the Pinto sold as well as the Honda Civic does today). They figured out what the cost of a few lives was (in court settlement terms) and found it was far less than fixing all those cars. Eventually, many years later some engineers I believe retired from Ford and squealed on them and it made national headlines. The cars were already redesigned by the time the report came out.

A third scenario is also the fact that Internet forums like these are a magnet for people posting problems with their cars. After all, most posts are someone looking for an answer to a problem. So the cars may appear to have more problems than others. Don't forget, before the days of the Internet (just a scant 10 years ago no one would have even thought about a forum like this), there could have been other model cars with transmission failure rates 10X higher than the TLs but because the only info you had about your car was through the dealer (and not fellow owners), everyone may have concluded the problem was restricted to just them, or just very rare. Yes, I agree it does seem like a lot of people have transmission trouble. But I also subscribe to www.maxima.org for my 1997 Maxima and the problems with auto transmissions on the 4th generation Maximas seem worse than that on the TLs. I have not had a single problem with the tranny on either my '97 SE (80,000 miles) or my '02 TL-S (9,500 miles). Even though I consider the Maxima to be a very reliable car, if I was an ignorant newbie on the forum, I'd think the Maxima was a POS based on some of the postings.

Back to Acura. Even if they know the trannies are bad, chances are they will do nothing and just happily replace each and every one on a case-by-case basis as they fail. That's the most cost-efficient thing to do. And the engineers will discover the problem (if there really is one) and the next model revision will have the changes implemented.

I really do feel sorry for all of you that have had transmission troubles. I'd be lost without my TL-S for that long and would rightfully be pi$$ed that a $30K car would have a major failure at such a young age. I hope it never happens to me. But unless we start to see hundreds and/or *thousands* of tranny failures, I doubt you'll ever hear a peep from Acura about it.

Just my $.02 (and then some)!!

 

Great post, pianoman41.

:-jon