Praying someone can guide me in the right direction.
I have a 2015 Mazda CX-5 automatic engine (4 cylinders). I was traveling for the holidays 3 hours away when I hit a deer. Airbags didn’t go off but the front damage was pretty bad. Called cops and filed a claim and report. they felt we could drive the last 10 minutes of our trip to our destination. One of last bit of the drive we noticed the car started jerking like the gears weren’t taking. The car got towed to the shop.
Long story short my insurance the shops my car was sent to say it’s the transmission that’s messed up but that since there is no physical damage to it the repairs fall on me for the transmission. They can’t definitively say it is or isn’t related so insurance is going with it isn’t.
Now I can fight it and find someone that can connect the two or I go ahead and just made thw repairs on my dime.
I have timestamps on my Googlemap from the distance my car drove that day and I have credit card receipts from when we stopped to out gas in and get food. No way my car could drive 2.5 hours on a faulty transmission that can’t make it from one shop to the dealership.
Get a lawyer to represent you in the dispute with your insurance company. Your insurance company is not your friend. This is an adversarial relationship, treat it as such.
NThe dealership said “we narrowed it down to the transmission. It’s probably the bearing or gears”. I asked if he was seeing codes or electrical issues and he said no. They just checked the other car parts to make sure those weren’t it
I asked if they pulled it apart to verify and they said no because they don’t have anyone to pay for the damage and that dealerships don’t even do transmission work because they normally just replace them.
Im 1000% sure it’s related since it happened right after we hit the deer. We barely made it the last 10 miles. No way we would have gone 120 miles without issues right before that.
Not knowing exactly what damage your car received…this is speculation.
But if you hit the deer on the front of your car and damaged the radiator, it’s possible a transmission fluid cooling line (which runs through the radiator) could have been damaged. And by damaged, I mean enough to leak out fluid over a period of time. You wouldn’t notice the transmission being damaged immediately if it was a slow leak.
Definitely correlated in my mind, Get it fixed and find the cause, then pursue the insurance reimbursement if it is related to the accident. Now a shop that only replaces transmissions indicates you need a new shop. A coffee cup fell off the table, landed on the computer keyboard and computer worked. Later I rebooted and npthing but beep codes. Took it in to a computer shop, thinking the keyboard must be hosed. Computer shop you need a new motherboard, not worth it for us to fix it. So I decided to check for memory errors as that was what the beep codes indicated.
The impact of the coffee cup had dislodged a cable, plugged it in and it fired up, had to replace the keyboard for $25, Just saying a new transmission may not be what you need.