Of course, Subaru could have a policy to replace whole transaxles as complete remanufactured units, even if only the diff fails, and in which case the dealer’s hands might be tied - it’s still a bullshit arrangement. ![]() ![]() I’d be concerned about any major repair being overblown unethically, for example, by billing you for a full transmission replacement, when only the diff had failed. If dealership can convince you it’s not a warranty or consumer law job, they make more profit - because there’s a margin on the parts which they do not earn in the case of warranty and consumer law repairs, and because they charge you a higher labour rate than the parent carmaker pays them for those kinds of warranty jobs.Īlso, dealers only get paid when they deliver a new car, and with 6-12-month waiting periods common in the industry currently, there’s a lot of pressure to keep the revenue flowing in via the service department. The customer service you actually receive as a car owner is down to the operating culture within the dealership, and head office really cannot control that.Ģ) Let’s talk about bad incentives at dealerships, which is the root cause of why people think car dealers are arseholes. Subaru can fluff up its rhetoric about service excellence as hard as it wants - and I believe they are most sincere about it at head office in north-western Sydney.īut at the end of the day, the point of contact for you, and the last dude in line, holding the service culture baton, is also holding the baton of Volkswagen, MG and Holden, etc. But guaranteed they do not have five separate service departments. I'm detailing it here so that if you are an independent mechanic and some strange Subaru rolls in one day, you can be prepared for the issue of front Subaru differential refill points, because that's kind of important.įor clarification I’d suggest grabbing this Tech Talk report from the VACC, which covers this issue in granular detail:ġ) The dealership here is multi-franchised - Geoff King Motors flies the Subaru, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, MG and even the defunct Holden brand flags. This problem is actually somewhat prolific, I'm told. I give Mr Rattenbury 13 points out of a possible 10 for his examination and diagnosis. And there's heat damage in the diff which is consistent with this mode of failure. It would take this minor change to the casting dies to make a major improvement with in-service mistakes.Įssentially, what the report says is the diff eventually overheats because it's not lubricated, then the bearings fail, the pinion seal fails because of the non-support of the pinion shaft and the CVT fluid - now contaminated with gear oil - flows forwards into the diff, albeit somewhat late to do any real good. The engineer in me needs to point out to you that Fuji Heavy Industries could virtually negate the risk of this mis-filling failure mode simply by labelling the filling points with the words ‘trans’ and ‘diff’ respectively, next to those respective filling points. This excerpt is from Grant Rattenbury from the A&B diff detective mob in Melbourne who's been there for 30 years - he's a qualified mechanic and is probably beyond proficient at diagnosing this kind of thing by now. ![]() Generally, that's bad.ĭoing this, obviously the CVT becomes contaminated with the wrong oil and the diff becomes a ticking time bomb of low to no lubrication, waiting to go bang, out there on the highway. The front half is physically bolted to the bottom of the CVT housing it just looks like a big aluminium block when you get underneath and look.Ī) If you really don't know what you're doing in the service department regarding this transmission, you probably shouldn't be doing it and ī) It is hypothetically possible to drain the front diff and then crack open entirely the wrong fill point and erroneously dump all of that brand new diff oil into this CVT. ![]() The back half goes to a prop shaft that travels the length of the vehicle before it engages a rear differential. The crankshaft of the engine goes into the transmission, there's a CVT, and then there's a transfer case type of gearing arrangement that splits the drive front and rear. You have to remember that the CVT and the front diff are bolted together, like a transaxle. The report is entirely consistent with the following failure mechanism.
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