I am a 70+ female and enjoy driving my GREAT 98 Nissan Maxima GLE and don’t want to give it up till I’m say 99+. I have 126,000 miles on my car and I’m pretty sure the transmission fluid hasn’t been change at least since 60,000 miles. My local service manager said if I haven’t done it…don’t do it, because if I do…I’ll #@%$# up my car and will end up having to replace the transmission. His philosophy, like my doctor’s, if it’s not broken - don’t try fixing it.
My husband prefers using his bicycle for transportation so he’s not much help, he would love to replace my car with a bike if I’d let him.
What do you think?
Bad advice from the service manager. Have a mechanic drain the fluid, drop the transmission pan, and change the filter. Refill with fresh transmission fluid.
Shops don’t want to get blamed for “ruining” high-mileage transmissions by changing the fluid, a low-profit job…So they invent urban legends like this to explain their reluctance to service your car… If changing the fluid causes to transmission to fail, it was going to fail anyway…A fluid change can only help…
Examine your existing fluid on the dip-stick…Good fluid is a nice, bright pink color and has little or no odor. BAD fluid will be almost brown in color and have a heavy odor. Most fall somewhere in-between and can benefit from being serviced…
“The only thing holding it together is the varnish…I’d leave it alone” That theory has many proponents and I’m SURE they will respond here…
Its true that sometimes transmissions go wacky after being serviced.
Sometimes that’s because people don’t have them serviced until they are already acting funny. Then the service is just way too little way too late.
Sometimes it is because the shops make a mess of the service. One of the most common issues is not using the correct transmission fluid.
Then there’s just plain old coincidence.
However, in general, if a transmission is properly serviced, the service itself can only do good things. I cannot do any harm.
I would take the car to your best local transmission shop and ask them to drop the pan, inspect & change the filter. (There are cars for which that doesn’t apply. I do’t know if your is one of them. But if it is one where the pan can come off & has a filter to change at that point then that is what should be done).
The service manager is wrong. Keep in mind that very very few service managers or service writers have much in the way of mechanical expertise. Only 1 in 10,000 apparently has ever turned wrenches for a living and none of them are going to state numerous times during the course of a day to an assortment of customers that they flat do not know something so they go the improv route. In some cases it can be Comedy Central.
I also say get it changed. Another reason for the myth that changing it will cause a problem is that so many people never change the fluid UNTIL they start noticing a problem. Of course they don't want to admit that they really caused the problem by not servicing the transmission sooner, so when it starts showing problems because it has not been changed 30,000 miles or so earlier when there was no problem they have the fluid changed and then when it fails next month the blame the transmission, not their failure to change the fluid.