bytor said:
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.
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
