Thread: New Hilux Auto Transmission Shudder?

Originally Posted by Flyblown

It got in because you’ve submerged your transmission in water.

I’m picking that you’re probably discussing this elsewhere as well, being a new member on here, with no hunting, shooting or fishing posts to your name. Perhaps you arrived here because of a Google search. You’ll be probably looking for some support because you know you are potentially facing a very big repair bill. All this is perfectly understandable.

The bottom line is that this is an avoidable problem that Toyota (or any other 4WD manufacturer) is going to place fairly and squarely on you. Water in the transmission, whether older manual boxes or more modern auto boxes, is an age-old problem that always has exactly the same underlying cause. If you say you have only been fording shallow water and never stationary in water <700mm then I am going to sit here and probably not believe you. That is not only an online forum problem, but also the problem you will have with Toyota.

And I can’t say I really blame them. All manufacturers have to draw a line somewhere. The 700mm max wading depth has been cast in stone for many years going back to the 80 series Land Cruisers and 4th or 5th gen Hilux.

Good luck. I hope you get it resolved in your favour, but you should probably start planning otherwise.

Against that, as a new vehicle the standard procedure for rectifying contamination at the dealer/maintainer appears to not been have followed which looks to have possibly created more issues. Everyone makes mistakes, but stacking two or more mistakes on each other does not make a clear cut case! Water contamination is one thing, but not doing a full machine flush is in my mind very slack.

It's not a point of getting into the inevitable argument, but I'm hearing so many of these situations with dealers now that are in this category that it's starting to become a regular. I've had my own issues where the dealers answer was a $9K parts swap after a $1K one didn't work - that wouldn't have worked either but after the discussion of "who is paying for your exploratory chuck bits at it exercise" and being told it wasn't a warranty job and we can have the discussion if it doesn't fix the vehicle I kinda said hell nah. In the end it was all computer and electronic related and the identified repair wouldn't have fixed the vehicle's fault.