02 camry 3.0 V6 /// 190k miles /// Having trouble getting into 4th gear/OD
I recently bought the car and upon initial inspection I noticed the trans fluid to be low. When topping it off I failed to check both sides of the dipstick; the side with the writing to guage the level is just right, but after noticing issues & checking again, I realized the backside of the dipstick shows levels to be a bit too high. Would this cause the trans to have trouble getting into 4th gear? The majority of the time the trans won’t shift into 4th, even at 80mph & 5k rpm…
OD is enabled; shifts just fine in and out of all other gears.
Any help/direction/suggestions/advice is welcomed and greatly appreciated!
Yes, it was on when I bought the car; it’s triggered by a sensor (can’t remember which sensor & when I looked into it I found that the sensor may be fine & the check engine light triggered unnecessarily…or… I may need to clean/repair/replace the sensor).
However, I didn’t have this trans issue until I topped the fluid off.
If the Check Engine light was on when you bought the car, and it’s still on, for all you know there could be code stored that indicates why the transmission isn’t shifting correctly.
Overfilling transmission fluid will not affect shifting. The first step in getting to the bottom of many issues is to solve check engine codes first. If you have codes post them. Stored codes show up on scanners (not all scanners) and they don’t illuminate the check engine light. But giving us what codes come up will help us help you.
I know … I was in the process of selling a 2008 BMW when it was totalled in a hit & run (I didn’t have collision on it). I took $950 for it three days later and bought this Camry for $1,200 the next day (I desperately needed a vehicle) from a friend that had just picked it up from auction a few days prior.
Let some fluid out of the transmission and see if the symptom improves. Over-filling might could cause something like this. My Ford truck’s C4 transmission is very sensitive to fluid level. More so if it is a little low than a little high, but too high could cause problems too. As posted above, if the CEL is on that needs to be resolved too, as there could be some interaction going on that’s affecting the transmission. When a diagnostic code indicates a sensor problem, that usually doesn’t mean the sensor itself is faulty. It just means there’s something associated with the sensor reading that’s confusing the computer.
