POS 96T&C

Just some venting: I unfortunately own the above. Last Feb 26, the tranny
with 68K miles seized. Had it replaced with a rebuilt unit, got 3/36
warranty. well, the same thing happened today, tranny has less than 12K
miles on it. First thing I'm going to do after it is fixed under the
warranty is to sell it and buy a reliable van like a Honda or Toyota. If
there is anyone considering buying any Chrysler van, run for your life, not
to mention your wallet as I will never, ever own a Chrylser again.

 

Hmm - who did your rebuild on the tranny?

The 4 speed transmissions in this year of van are known troublemakers. That
is
why Chrylser has released many fixes since 1996 for these along with
instructions
as to how to incorporate the fixes into transmissions that are being
rebuilt. If
the place that did the rebuild on your transmission isn't that familiar with
these
transmissions then they probably didn't follow the factory-recommended
procedures
for rebuilding the transmissions. They also probably didn't have you
install
a transmission cooler which has been found by many experienced Chrysler
shops
to be a requirement for these vans, nor did they tell you about the need for
frequent fluid changes on these trans.

While you have a justified beef on the original trans blowing up at 68K, I
think
that your being rediculous in blaming the trans for failing the second time
when
clearly it wasn't properly rebuilt. Unless your towing a trailer full of a
ton of
cement every day, a properly rebuilt trans does not fail in 12K miles.

Ted

 

Was it maintained? 68 is very short unless it was abused. Seized? What
happened? Sounds like the diferential pin came out. That only happens from
severe wheel spinning. If it happened again I'd be looking at a the nut
behind the steering wheel. You SHOULD go get one of the others anyway then
when you have all the trans troubles I'm reading about in the toyota's you
can than be told their line of BS, same with the Hondas. Their owners are
full of trans issues.
Larry

 

I own a '96 T&C LXi non-POS which now has almost 173,000 miles on it. The
original tranny went south at 117,000 miles and was replaced with a Chrysler
rebuilt unit with the 3/36 warranty. The original tranny was dealer-serviced at
30K, 60K and 90K. At 117,000 it was completely flushed and serviced by the
dealer and crapped out shortly thereafter. I cannot complain about the tranny
failure because it was, and still is, a daily driver in Los Angeles stop-and-go
traffic. Additionally it made three round-trips (in the heat of August each
time) to Yosemite towing a loaded Coleman Chesapeake camping trailer (complete
with wood for five nights and food for seven), the four of us in my family
(along with all of our clothing), four bicycles, four rafts and other stuff.
Additionally it did the same to Yellowstone one year and another year it hauled
an over-loaded U-Haul trailer (to the point the automatic leveling suspension
was not able to compelely level the van) back from Dayton, Ohio.

POS? I don't think so! Yeah, there are little things here-and-there that have
needed replacing, but it has not put a dent in my wallet any more than any
other vehicle would. BTW - this is our third Chrysler product (it replaced a
'92 T&C w/ 87,000 miles and a '93 LeBaron LX Convertible w/ 57,000 miles that
were traded in for this van). Since this van we have purchased a used '93 Jeep
GC that now has over 189,000 miles on it and an '04 Pacifica AWD that now has
over 9,000 miles on it.

I think if the term "POS" is to be used it should apply to how YOU treated your
T&C!

 

I guess my 96 Grand Voyager transmission didn't get the word that it is
a troublemaker as it has worked perfectly for 146,000 miles now...


Matt

 

I think Ted's point is well stated, no matter how well you treat a vehicle
sometimes things just break, I had a bearing take a crap in a 98 Voyager 4
banger with the 3 speed auto@ 78K, normally a durable transmission..... I
did all the right stuff had the fluid and filter and bands adjusted at 30
(bought it used with 30) 45, 60 and 75K miles,,, Chrysler's fault,,, could
be, I am an old man, don't drive hard or pull anything or carry big loads,
just wife and me (well not so BIG loads) .... BUT

Sometimes stuff just breaks, it is a machine, and it does get used,
.. one just grows tired of hearing how come my headgasket blew @ only 120K
miles and everyone else gets 200K... .happens... many many variables,
maintenance is only one of them, and driving technique is only another, but
there are so many more..

Sorry people, if you drive your car long enough sooner or later (hopefully
later) something is going to break and you are going to have to fix it or
get rid of the car... my vote nowdays is to fix things usually as I can buy
a LOT of repairs for half the price of any new vehicle on the road..

Just my $.02

Ted

 

I'll second that, with another 96 GV (trailer tow package) with 88168
one-owner miles. They had to replace some kind of pump in the transmission
a while ago, and I've had problems with the factory transmission cooler
lines leaking, but I drive it very carefully and expect to for years. I
think all automobiles suck about equal. MB

 

It was a remanufactured unit from Chrysler. I saw the packing and the
label., so again, it was Chrysler who did not do it properly.

 

Did anyone catch that the second transmission went out at 12K miles? And
no, its not the driver who happens to be my wife hauling our 2 kids around
town. Last I checked, she does not drive in the mud to spin the wheels nor
does she lay rubber on the pavement. BTW, the second trans was/is a
Chrysler remanufactured unit that was supposed to have all the fixes and
upgrades and yes, the proper ATF fluid was used in it. Could be I just was
on the receiving end of a poorly rebuilt unit.

 

I didn't realize that you can have an affair with your car and take things
personally like you do. Silly me. How would you like the thought of
dropping $4-5000 in a years time on 2 transmissions for the same car?
Hopefully, the warranty will cover it and it won't cost a dime.

 

I wouldn't be too sure of that. While others may know better I would
suspect that Chrysler
subs out their trans remanufacturing to a different company than the one
that makes the brand
new ones. In any case my point was that you can have a great design but
poor execution -
in short, it's not easy to draw valid conclusions about how good the design
is just by looking at
the results alone.

Unfortunately one other thing that people many times don't discover is that
there is a
difference between a remanufactured unit and a rebuilt unit.

Rebuilds are done individually one at a time. As a result the rebuilder if
he is good, can
pay a lot more attention to your trans, and can make better decisions about
what parts
to retain and what to scratch.

Remans on the other hand are done on an assembly line, in quantity. If the
line is run well
and the line manager knows his shit then you get pretty good and consistent
units out
of it. Unfortunately it is more common that the people on the line are not
paid all that
well and are not all that good at what they are doing, and the line manager
is under a lot
of pressure to get units out the door in quantity. So the remanufacturing
on the units
tends to be done in a far more strict set of guidelines, and if the line
spec says to not
replace a part, if the core on the line has a failed one of those parts, the
whole core
gets scrapped out and if that happens too much it interferes with
production, so
there's some pressure to let marginal parts go by, where a rebuilder would
have
replaced them just to be sure.

Now, I can't fault you for going back to Chrysler for a replacement
transmission, I
understand that when a person has a vehicle down unexpectedly, they want to
get
it back up ASAP and don't want to take the time checking around trans shops
and
getting references and all that who-ha. So the dealer becomes the default
choice. But
let me just point out a few things to you - for the future, facts of the car
life as it were.

Number one - no automaker really wants their customers to prolong a
vehicle's life
with heroic measures - ie: replacing large subassemblies like an engine or
transmission.
From Chrysler's point of view, vehicles manufactured in 1996 are dinosaurs
and
they are more than happy to see them go to the Great Wrecking Yard in the
Sky. In
fact, the only people who really want to see you keep your van on the road
for many
happy years after the warranty is the REST of the automotive industry, the
countless
subasembly suppliers, private mechanics, and parts industries and everybody
OTHER
than the actual automaker themselves.

So the result of this is that to be perfectly honest about it, the rule of
thumb is to
take anything out of warranty to someplace OTHER than the dealership. Now I
know there's plenty of exceptions to the rule and plenty of dealerships out
there
with really teriffic service departments who don't deserve to be tarred but
they are
exceptions to the rule - the majority of dealership service places simply
don't see
many vehicles that are that old. It's more common to take the older
vehicles to
mechanics running their own shops.

Number two is that if your the kind of person who gets fazed by a trans
rebuild on
an 8 year old vehicle, you honestly are not the right kind of person who
should be
owning an older car that's off warranty. Owning older vehicles (or
continuing to
own your new car past 7-8 years) is making a choice to take a gamble. You
are
gambling that your going to get an extra 50,000 miles out of the thing for
essentially $0 car payment, vs losing the book value of the vehicle if
something
major does happen. (like a trans job) The odds are most definitely in your
favor,
but there is _always_ a risk. In this case you lost the gamble. If you
continue to
make this kind of gamble the rest of your car-owning life, in the majority
of cases
your gonna win. No question. But, you have to have the nerves or
willingness to
do this, and if your being rattled enough to sell the van after a trans
failure, then
you simply don't have what it takes to take this kind of gamble. Rest easy,
though,
there's nothing really wrong with this. The vast majority of new car owners
don't have
what it takes to own an older used vehicle either - they prefer the comfort
of
owning an on-warranty vehicle to the uncertainty of owning a used one and
saving
a lot of money over their lifetimes in car payments.

So, knowing all this let me tell you one other thing - you made a big
mistake replacing
the trans in this van. What you should have done is the day after the van's
trans
blew chunks, you should have walked into the Chrysler dealership and traded
it in
on a brand new T&C van. You would have ended up with the security and
comfort
of a really quite long and generous new vehicle warranty, and the dealership
would
have probably given you a pretty good trade in allowance, because even
though
the trans was blown up in it, it is after all a lot cheaper for a Chrysler
dealership to
replace a trans since they don't charge themselves a markup on labor, and
since the
mileage of the vehicle is so low, a dealership could get top dollar for it
used, once
they replaced the trans and cleaned it. Almost
certainly the trade in would be more than what you are going to get for the
van on
the used market, less the cost of the replacement tranny. You might even
consider
trying this ploy with the dealership even now, as since the replacement
trans blew up
at 12K, you have good "guilt leverage" as my mother says.

Ted

 

Chrysler does not remanufacture parts. The trannies are sub-ed out to
different manufacturers that must test there trannies thouroghly before
sending out. Chrysler actually got rid of a few re-man suppliers in the past
6 years because of to many defects. I worked at Mopar in sales/Marketing and
I know engineers at Mopar had to visit these Re-man Facilities 3 times a
year.

By the way My Aunt bought herself a 2004 S600 for a retirement gift fo
herself. In the 6 months she's had it , She has been in for major repairs 4
times. One transmission included. She was bothering me about it. Ha,Ha,Ha
German engineering is no different then any other. Vehicles are mechanical,
Metal on metal, Plastic on Metal, Something will give.

 

Bytor,

If the problem turns out to be the transmission, then I would very much
expect the warranty to cover this and your dealer to go to bat for you,
especially given the $ you spent with them recently. Yes, it's very
possible that you got a defective rebuilt unit and Chrysler should stand
behind it, but it is also possible that the problem is caused by a defective
sensor or something else outside of the actual transmission that was
replaced.

I agree with you given the time frame and the usage of the vehicle you
described, that it is not likely that the problem is due to driver abuse.

Do let us all know the outcome. I think much of the negative response you
have received is because you posted with the "POS" reference in the subject
line prior to knowing the root cause of this second failure while you were
(understandably) upset.

Bob

 

Well Ted, you did it again...


Don't know how you managed to remember all those points and put them in one
post, but "Bully" for you.. excellent show...

It all boils down to money doesn't it... Some people like to spend it on
cars,,,"nice shiny new ones" and there are others that take pride in being a
"cheap" as possible in keeping the old ones running as long as
practical...and you sure are right about the "some people can't take the
pressure" of owning an older vehicle... I have 2 brothers just like that ...

Things do wear out and sometimes you get a surprise none of us likes,,,,and
something just breaks, hell I don't know how many parts are in a car or even
a transmission, but I suspect if there was anywhere near a 1% failure rate
on these overall, these boards would be a whole lot busier than they are..

Another $.02

Keep going like this I won't be able to afford even a junk ! LOL..

 

Often the OEM manufacturer doesn't do the remanufacturing of their own
transmissions. I don't know if Chrysler does or doesn't, but there is a
good chance they don't.

Matt

 

That is the most likely possibility. Did both transmissions fail the
same way? It is remote, but there is always the possibility of a
misalignment between engine and transaxle that could be putting side
stresses on the transmission shaft that it wasn't designed for. This is
probably quite a long shot, but I've seen in the past cases where the
back of an engine or bell housing wasn't machined perpendicular to the
drive axis and this can cause repeated failures of good transmissions.
However, if something like this is the cause, the failure mode will be
the same for each transmission.


Matt

 

Thanks for the thoughts. I think I'm going to take your advice and get rid
of it in the very near future. It's not worth the risk.

 

Bob,

Chrysler is going to replace th transmission, however, even though their
warranty card clearly states "ALL PARTS and LABOR", Chrysler is only going
to cover about 1/4 of the labor cost to replace it. This, in my opinion, is
like rubbing salt in a wound. I guess they really don't care about their
customers if they won't even honor their own warranty. Any thoughts on how
to make them pay for the entire labor cost without a big legal battle?

 

Yep, I learned that in the school of hard knocks.

What people forget all the time with vehicles is that if you are driving
them
they are NOT INVESTMENTS!! They are money sinks. If you are fool
enough to dump a lot of money into them you end up losing a lot of money.

Well, when your 85 years old and you have no retirement I guess you
have the memories of driving shiny new cars, right? I'd rather have the
money then.

There isn't really any "long as practical" If you live in the right climate
where
they don't salt the roads, and you don't get into an accident, a vehicle can
last a lifetime. Really. I've been in and out of wrecking yards for over
20
years now and there's been a marked change in the quality of cars now
coming into yards.

Years ago there were only 2 kinds of cars that ever came into wrecking
yards. The first were the smashed up ones, the second were ones that were
ugly as sin and had all the paint peeled off and panels hanging by rust
threads.

Today there's a large percentage of vehicles that are coming into wrecking
yards that look literally like they are just about brand new. These are 8
year old vehicles that have 100K+ on the odometer, look immaculate
inside and the paint is still in excellent shape - and they have a blown
engine
or a blown tranny. Or the engine simply runs "funny" and nobody has been
able to figure out why. Some of the smarter yards pick the best of these
and
do engine swaps with smashed vehicles then roll them over into used car
lots,
but the majority of these vehicles just get dragged out to the yard and
picked
apart.

It's really a paradise in the used car market for the buyers, now. Take
vans.
In a lot of areas of the country (like where I live) you can go find a early
90's
T&C or Caravan that has engine trouble for
less than $500. For another $4K you can have a shop completely remove and
replace the entire power train - that's engine and trans - with rebuilt
units done
by top of the line rebuilders in your city. And both of them will give
you 3 if not 5 year warranties on the subassemblies. Then for another $1000
you can have an auto upholstery shop completely tear out and replace the
interior with new carpet, headliner, and reupholster the seats and also
have a glass place pull and reseal all the fixed windows in the vehicle.
For
maybe $5K if your careful you can have a vehicle that is going to last
the same mileage as a new vehicle, have nearly the same warranty, and smell
like a new car to boot - and cost a quarter or less than the cost of a new
car. Even if you finance the vehicle with a bank at a higher interest rate
than a car dealer will give you, you still will pay far less money in total
and
have a lower monthly payment than a new car. And on top of that if you
take pictures of the restoration and save all the receipts, that will
override
book value if you then carry comprehensive insurance on it, so if it gets
smashed up, the insurance will pay out on it. And even better will be that
you will be dumping your money into the local economy, not sending it
overseas.

People just don't understand the markup in new vehicles. Sure, I know
that the automakers don't see a lot of that money per unit because their
labor and r&d costs now are so high. But, the fact of it is that the
automakers
and the new car buyers have all decided they don't want to buy cheap,
mass produced cars anymore like the VW Beetle was. So instead of
running a few basic car models that they don't have to completely retool
for every year, and that can be sold for half the cost of what cars cost
today,
the automakers are all forced into this plethora of models and retooling
and doublespeak as if a station wagon isn't a station wagon.

I just hope that by the time the baby boomers have all gone to the grave
that the economy isn't totally wrecked. It's that group and their cash
that's driving a lot of this.

Ted

 

Amen to that! Provided it is a good solid car to start with.

I've been driving the same car since 1980. 430,000 miles as of last
week. I've bought newer cars for the "family" car and for my wife
(although the newest has nearly 210,000 miles), but I'm going to keep my
old '73 until the wheels fall off.. then I'll put 'em back on and keep
it some more.