My mother has an (you guessed it!) ’01 Volvo XC70 Cross Country wagon with the Geartronic manumatic tranny and AWD. Aside from the various electrical bugs that keep popping up, it seems that Volvo (or Ford maybe) decided that delicate operations such as check the automatic transmission fluid are best left to the elite personnel at the Volvo dealerships. I searched every inch of the engine compartment, and even crawled underneath to see what little I could of the tranny itself. I even betrayed my masculine imperitive and…gulp…checked the owners manual. And even that told me nothing. Oil dipstick? Check. Coolant? Check. Power steering, brake fluid, washer fluid? Check. No ATF dipstick. I even mentioned it to a guy at a garage when we were talking. "Oh, sure, it’s there somewhere. Here, I’ll show ya!" he says, before proceeding to search high and low for the next quarter hour, only to finally admit defeat.
So, is there some wise and learn’d person out there who knows the answer to the great mystery of How To Make Sure Your Volvo Tranny Isn’t About To Commit Hara-kiri? If so, I would be most grateful to you. And so on and so forth. Seriously, I can’t imagine a sealed automatic trans. Hell, I can’t imagine a tranny you can’t check/top off the fluid of either. So much for what I knew.
So when the car is 15, or 20 years old, I’ll still have to find a special shop and pay $150 bucks to check the ATF? Sweet. That really sucks for the car companies, huh? Now everyone without a brand new, under warranty car is screwed. I thought it was bad enough that they engineer them to die by 100,000 miles. Not that it matters to them. They wouldn’t want to have to PAY any of that warranty crap. For those lucky enough to have it. Any wonder that car companies in general are going under? Ethically, they’re not all that much better than the tobacco companies. Screw the poor dude….I got profit margins to make. I mean, taxes on three beachside properties in three cities gets pretty steep. I may have to put of my third vacation this year. Damn, why does life have to be so hard.
the fluid level is checked by using special equipment for adding trans fluid and a scanner to determine proper transmission fluid temperature. You can’t do it yourself.
You don’t need to check the level unless you are leaking fluid. This keeps shadetree mechanics and untrained jiffy lube techs and even owners of the vehicle with the best of intentions from topping off the fluid with the wrong stuff and ruining a perfectly good transmission.
the fluid level is checked by using special equipment for adding trans fluid and a scanner to determine proper transmission fluid temperature. You can’t do it yourself.
You don’t need to check the level unless you are leaking fluid. This keeps shadetree mechanics and untrained jiffy lube techs and even owners of the vehicle with the best of intentions from topping off the fluid with the wrong stuff and ruining a perfectly good transmission.
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