Looking for advice - faithful servant has transmission issue
Discussion
Hi folks,
We have owned our Mitsubishi Outlander 2007 petrol automatic since Feb 2014 when we bought her from an old gent with only 17000 miles on her! She's now got 120 000 miles. The car has FSH and is my wife's commuter plus has transported us many happy miles all over the country camping, kayaking etc. Her appetite for fuel (about 24mpg!) has made us want to look for a more economical alternative for a while now though.
About 2 weeks ago noticed a whine from the transmission and booked her into local garage for MOT and asked them to check the whining noise. Fresh MOT, new droplink, 2 new tyres and £440 lighter they didn't seem to be too interested in the whine.
Less than a week later wife gets in car to drive home and it starts making loud knocking noise. She drives home about 20 miles and drops it back into garage. They take a look and advise low transmission fluid plus the car will now only move forward or backwards about a yard at a time before transmission disengages. Sometimes car refuses to rev, sometimes it will rev but no drive to the wheels. They got their fault code expert on to it and he pulled up the following:
P0746 Hydraulic control system function
P0868 Secondary pressure drop
P0725 Abnormal engine speed
They have topped up transmission fluid but still not moving properly. They are a village garage and frankly we don't even use them for servicing, just MOT's as they're fine with tyres and exhausts but much else is beyond them. They have lent us their hire car short term for free so wife can get to work.
I now have three options:
1. Contact my TVR mechanic who comes to the house, is a genius and has taken over all our car servicing needs. His recommendation without seeing car was transmission flush and replace.
2. Get car shipped to transmission specialist (Hardy Engineering Leatherhead or Expressgearbox.co.uk in Portsmouth seem likely candidates)
3. Scrap car. Value when running was about £2500 apparently, We buy any car offered £765. I might get more trying to sell it as a non runner on ebay I guess although engine is great and ironically it actually has 12 months MOT - it just won't move much!
I guess I'm worried about this getting very expensive very fast. I might be lucky and it could be a stuck solenoid or dirty fluid or something simple, on the other hand I'm not sure I have the stomach to pay somebody £500 to start taking the gearbox or transfer box apart to then present me with a £2000 bill for repair!
Looking for advice. What this has done is brought forward our quest for a car for our daughter (17 next month) as the plan is to buy her a car and let my wife use it until we have this sorted out one way or another!
Grateful for views/input from the community here on what to do!
saxon
We have owned our Mitsubishi Outlander 2007 petrol automatic since Feb 2014 when we bought her from an old gent with only 17000 miles on her! She's now got 120 000 miles. The car has FSH and is my wife's commuter plus has transported us many happy miles all over the country camping, kayaking etc. Her appetite for fuel (about 24mpg!) has made us want to look for a more economical alternative for a while now though.
About 2 weeks ago noticed a whine from the transmission and booked her into local garage for MOT and asked them to check the whining noise. Fresh MOT, new droplink, 2 new tyres and £440 lighter they didn't seem to be too interested in the whine.
Less than a week later wife gets in car to drive home and it starts making loud knocking noise. She drives home about 20 miles and drops it back into garage. They take a look and advise low transmission fluid plus the car will now only move forward or backwards about a yard at a time before transmission disengages. Sometimes car refuses to rev, sometimes it will rev but no drive to the wheels. They got their fault code expert on to it and he pulled up the following:
P0746 Hydraulic control system function
P0868 Secondary pressure drop
P0725 Abnormal engine speed
They have topped up transmission fluid but still not moving properly. They are a village garage and frankly we don't even use them for servicing, just MOT's as they're fine with tyres and exhausts but much else is beyond them. They have lent us their hire car short term for free so wife can get to work.
I now have three options:
1. Contact my TVR mechanic who comes to the house, is a genius and has taken over all our car servicing needs. His recommendation without seeing car was transmission flush and replace.
2. Get car shipped to transmission specialist (Hardy Engineering Leatherhead or Expressgearbox.co.uk in Portsmouth seem likely candidates)
3. Scrap car. Value when running was about £2500 apparently, We buy any car offered £765. I might get more trying to sell it as a non runner on ebay I guess although engine is great and ironically it actually has 12 months MOT - it just won't move much!
I guess I'm worried about this getting very expensive very fast. I might be lucky and it could be a stuck solenoid or dirty fluid or something simple, on the other hand I'm not sure I have the stomach to pay somebody £500 to start taking the gearbox or transfer box apart to then present me with a £2000 bill for repair!
Looking for advice. What this has done is brought forward our quest for a car for our daughter (17 next month) as the plan is to buy her a car and let my wife use it until we have this sorted out one way or another!
Grateful for views/input from the community here on what to do!
saxon
Thanks Clapham, just spoke to Mark at the place your recommended and as you said he was full of good advice - great guy.
He feels we would be in for £2500 rebuild plus VAT so advised us to think about how much we really want to keep that particular car, all good no nonsense advice.
My head is saying that scrapping it for £765 (Webuy any car) or even a bit more if I can get it makes more sense even if the car has been a great one for 7.5 years. Truth is the rest of it is in great shape and FSH but it still is expensive on fuel being petrol.
Thanks for you help,
Saxon
He feels we would be in for £2500 rebuild plus VAT so advised us to think about how much we really want to keep that particular car, all good no nonsense advice.
My head is saying that scrapping it for £765 (Webuy any car) or even a bit more if I can get it makes more sense even if the car has been a great one for 7.5 years. Truth is the rest of it is in great shape and FSH but it still is expensive on fuel being petrol.
Thanks for you help,
Saxon
Hi
I'm just a DIY mechanic but I've worked on this transmissions in the past. Ford, Volvo (especially my XC90) and Mitsubishi use the same auto gearbox. From my experience its a very easy fix if you can DYI it. I've done this for Ford Galaxy and Volvo from my driveway but not for Mitsubishi but It'd be the same.
Its the solenoids get clogged up and all what I had to do was just removing them and cleaning them. You have to drain the fluid and then take the black plastic cover off, then remove the entire unit out of the transmission body. It sounds scary but its not. It only cost me for fluid - I bought the cheap ones from eBay to make sure everything was working and then replaced with original fuel specs by Ford/Volvo.
Auto gearboxes never fail on mechanical bit, unless it was poorly maintained - its always the electronics. When solenoid gets stuck TCM throws all sort of error codes
As ClaphamGT3 recommended, hes your man for the job
I'm just a DIY mechanic but I've worked on this transmissions in the past. Ford, Volvo (especially my XC90) and Mitsubishi use the same auto gearbox. From my experience its a very easy fix if you can DYI it. I've done this for Ford Galaxy and Volvo from my driveway but not for Mitsubishi but It'd be the same.
Its the solenoids get clogged up and all what I had to do was just removing them and cleaning them. You have to drain the fluid and then take the black plastic cover off, then remove the entire unit out of the transmission body. It sounds scary but its not. It only cost me for fluid - I bought the cheap ones from eBay to make sure everything was working and then replaced with original fuel specs by Ford/Volvo.
Auto gearboxes never fail on mechanical bit, unless it was poorly maintained - its always the electronics. When solenoid gets stuck TCM throws all sort of error codes
As ClaphamGT3 recommended, hes your man for the job
Edited by zakmuh on Wednesday 26th January 16:21
Scrap it or sell it locally for spares or repair. (I doubt you'll beat the wbac offer by enough to be worth the hassle.)
It doesn't owe you anything and the scrap value plus reasonably likely cost of repair is more than the vehicle will be worth afterwards. Better to save the inconvenience and risk and spend the money now buying the replacement. The fact you were already looking to replace it anyway just confirms that's the sensible course of action.
Look at the other repairs you've done recently as part of the cost of ownership. Don't let the sunk cost fallacy trick you into spending good money on top of bad.
It doesn't owe you anything and the scrap value plus reasonably likely cost of repair is more than the vehicle will be worth afterwards. Better to save the inconvenience and risk and spend the money now buying the replacement. The fact you were already looking to replace it anyway just confirms that's the sensible course of action.
Look at the other repairs you've done recently as part of the cost of ownership. Don't let the sunk cost fallacy trick you into spending good money on top of bad.
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