Collected a TZi auto from a family friend (widow of a mate of mine) today to do a bit of maintenance on it. It's only got around 130K klms on it and had just had its 80K service when she collected it but I have kept asking about the ATF if she has been getting it changed regularly. Eventually, it turns out her local yokel had been "topping it up" but not changing it and she tells me it had Dexron 3 in it and that's what he reckoned to use. I had doubts so I rang a mate at an oil company who looked up his book and almost freaked out that it had Dexron in it saying it would not work in this ZF transmission.
Then the penny dropped; I know of one guy who had two transmissions blow on him in two seperate cars but in only a couple of weeks and the same guy had been advised by another owner out here to keep the fluid changed and had suggested to change to Dexron and run it for a while and then change onto another grade which I thought was quite mad as the autos don't dump all the fluid at a change due to the torque converter retaining a fair amount. Then I remembered this guy giving the advice had been the victim of one or two "freak" auto disasters also.
Whilst I haven't as yet got the specs for what kind of ATF they are supposed to use (according to the Oil company guys info) has anyone heard of other cars popping their autos when run on Dexron? Reason I ask is that the car I collected today and one of the cars I referred to were both owned by the same guy and in the other case it had only done less than 120K klms when the box blew. The giver of the advice had a known good tranny blow and I'm sure the rebuilt version of it within a short space, so I'm a bit concerned over this thing I'm driving.
Alan S
I wonder how many have been bitten by this?
I wonder how many have been bitten by this?
By the time you're old enough to know it all, you can't remember why you were learning.