OK, I have the above vehicle with the 360 and a 5 spd manual tranny with 4wd. Had a little vibration that seemed like I needed to get the front end aligned. While driving down the highway the transmission literally fell out on the pavement. Bought a warranty from the dealer and the warranty company is telling me that they won’t cover the repairs because the U-Joints failed and that caused the tranny to fail and fall out. Does this sound feasible or is the warranty investigator just trying to save his company $3200? Thank you.
No. Bad U-joints won’t cause a transmission to fall out of a vehicle. And Ive seen some pretty chewed up U-joints. And the bolts that attach the transmission to the engine are on there pretty damn tight.
If the transmission has never been tampered with since the vehicle was new, then one would have to assume that when the transmission was attached to the engine, something got missed on the assembly line. And the transmission to engine hardware loosened up causing the transmission to seperate from the engine.
So, if investigator is saying the transmission fell out because of bad U-joints, they don’t know very much about vehicles.
Tester
Bwaaaahaha! I hope you laughed at the warranty company rep when they told you that.
Thank you… Now at least with your help, I will get hold of an attorney and fight this thing.
Be careful here. You might run into a problem hiring an attorney to prove your case. Because hiring an attorney might cost more than what the warranty company is trying to avoid paying. And this is called a burden case.
Instead what you want to do is have someone who knowlegable in the field of automotive mechanics look at the vehicle. And have them give an opinion as to why this happened. let’s say for instance that the locating dowels for the transmission were never installed on the engine at the assembly line. This would put undue stress on the hardware that connects the transmission to the engine. and eventually this hardware would fail.
But the U-joint therory doesn’t fly. And whatever caused this to happen should be pretty obvious.
Tester
OK, We’ll take this one step at a time but at the very least it seems as if this warranty company is selling an insurance policy and then doing everything they can to avoid paying claims. We will start with the State Department of Insurance and Attorney Generals office to file complaints and see if they can give us any help. Thanks again
hello again Tester,
I have gotten home and have seen the truck. the transmission is not what fell out, the transfer case fell out along with the drive shaft and I can see that the Ujoint is completely gone from one end of the drive shaft and is still there but severely damaged. The investigator is contending that a Ujoint failed and was not replaced causing severe vibration that caused the transfer case to come come seperated and fail. I would think that the vibrations from a bad Ujoint would be so severe that a person wouldn’t be able to drive the truck? At least as far as causing the transfer case to fall out.