I've got no beaters. I've got a couple of decent to nice cars. My wife drives the Impala. I drive the 740. We both have automatic transmissions. Hers is on its death bed over at AAMCO. Double A (Ka-ching) MCO. The transmission specialists.
Basically, you don't fix transmissions. You rebuild them. Transmissions in contemporary automobiles are extraordinarily complex machines. I don't know why they are, but I could hazard a guess. Restless engineers at GM and Ford wanted to twiddle, and their bosses were too stupid to stop them. According to the man who will be in charge of the rebuilding of my transmission, there was a time, maybe 20 years ago (that would be the 90s) when the big automakers had 3 maybe 4 different models of transmissions. I would imagine the smart guys there had squeezed all the cost out of manufacturing them. But now there are scores of transmissions. Each model car might have its own transmission. It's rather like software bloat. The cost of custom manufacturing must have gone so low that it didn't cost any more to speed up the design cycle for transmissions. So, why not?
If a transmission is built to last the life of a car, which for your generics is about 7 years I reckon, then ours pooped out just on schedule. Now it's going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 - 2200 bucks to rebuild it.
On the wall over at AAMCO. there's an explosion diagram of all the major assemblies in the gearbox. There are sun gears and multiple clutches, a couple of servo assemblies, a governor and god know how many gears on about 4 different axles. That was one of the simple ones from 1991. It costs 650 bucks just to take the damned thing apart and inventory the parts to see which are broken. I'm told that the there are $4000 worth of parts in the BMWs of today.
I understand, as you do, that this is all so we don't have to drive a stick. Does anybody even make a stick?
I thought about this on the way to work this morning. What is the old reliable automobile you can buy today? The one where the design hasn't gotten all twisty and complicated. Where the gas pedal is actually connected to the carbuerator -- err ..air/fuel delivery system. I'm thinking maybe it's a Ford F150. A truck. Everything else has gone to the dogs. The spoiled oversophisticated, yappy little rat-dogs.
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