Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP again. Dealer said transmission will actually cost $7500. Plus there are about $2000 of other repairs needed. So, we are getting rid of it. We might get a second opinion on the repairs. Dealer upped offer to $500, so that is great.


Question: The cars seems to drive fine. What happens when the transmission actually fails? Is it dangerous to drive it locally until it just dies? Just curious.

Is a transmission a normal thing that goes at 130,000 miles?

Yes, it’s normal for a CVT to fail *before* 130k miles.

The days of being able to put 250k miles on a car are over. If it has a CVT it will typically start to begin failing just after 100k miles.

Blame the govt. They’re the reason CVT’s became so widely used. CAFE standards. They get maybe 10% better mileage than a traditional automatic transmission. Over a fleet of millions of vehicles, that’s an enormous amount of fuel saving and subsequent pollution reduction. But the penalty for it is now cars don’t last nearly as long as they did 20 years ago.


We have a 15 yard dumpster behind our shop that is now half-full of Nissan and Subaru CVT’s. All of them came out of cars that were otherwise still in pretty good shape. Most went on to the shredder because the transmission costs more than the car is worth.

It’s really sad we’ve been forced into this by the federal govt. We’re now throwing away cars at 100k miles when similar cars used to go 200k miles. It’s such a waste.