Looking for opinions from other frugal minded people.
Backstory - I bought the car 4 years ago with just under 80k miles on it. It now has 140k. I have not done any major work on the car yet. Both of our vehicles are paid off and I want to avoid more car payments if possible.
The issue is with shifting really hard from 2>3 or 3>4 when it gets good and warm (maybe 30-40 min of driving). One of the shop techs described the hard shift as "getting rear ended". Yeah...
I've taken it to two different shops. One said just replace the valve body - $2000. Another said replace the solenoids - $1300
I had the second shop do the solenoids and comes with a warranty. They called me and said it didn't fix the issue (not charging me so that's good).
The second shop then recommended a full rebuild. If it's that bad then there are probably metal shavings and other gunk in the transmission that could cause more problems down the road if you just replace the valve body. Replacing the valve body would NOT come with warranty as they feel it would be to much of a risk as it wouldn't truly fix the issue. They recommend a full rebuild ($4200) which would come with a 50k mile warranty.
Another possibility was they could install a used transmission with 85k miles which would come with a 12 month 12k mile warranty at a cost $2500.
I'm heavily leaning towards the used transmission. It's the cheapest option guaranteed to fix the issue. And if I get another 60k miles out of it (bringing total miles on the transmission to around 140k and miles on the car to 200k).
Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?
July 16, 2018 at 09:38AM
