one, two, three, four! Rev up your engines! It's time for the Scotty Kilmer Channel today I'm going to talk about the myth of
lifetime automatic transmission fluid, I'm always being to asked by people, Scotty it says that the transmission fluid in my car is lifetime, I never need to change
it, what do you think about that, well basically I think that it's just a dirty
little lie, because they're using the word lifetime in a different manner than
most people actually will, I even asked an auto engineer one time, what do you mean
by lifetime automatic fluid, and they said, well the fluid should last the
lifetime of the transmission, and then he said, oh you never have to change the
fluid, because it lasts as long as the transmission lasts, but I said hey, how
long is the transmission going to last, because if you look up powertrain
warranties, hey there's six years 70,000 miles, four years 50,000 miles,
four year 50,000 miles, some of them go five years 100,000 miles,
but they do stop, so if the transmission breaks down after the warranty, because
the fluids dirty and it's broken things down inside, guess what, you're the one
that's going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for another
transmission or a full rebuild, there's lots of parts inside a modern automatic
transmission, and they all have to be pressure lubricated with clean fluid, and
the gears inside have very close tolerances, even wear of a few
thousandths of an inch from dirty fluid can make them work poorly, and to add
insult to injury, unlike my old Toyota here, which has a dipstick for the
automatic transmissions, many cars don't have one, you can't even check the fluids
yourself anymore, jacking a car up and just taking out a drain plug and
changing the fluid like it used to be, some modern cars it takes all kinds of
equipment and skills just to change the fluid, because they made these bizarre
little things you have to do to change it, and if you try changing the fluid
yourself, look what you have to do on this two-year old Chrysler, you got to do
all kinds of stuff, you got to have a scan tool, you got to do all these different
tests, put the brake on, put it in reverse for five seconds, place it and drive hold
it for five seconds, release the brakes, and accelerate to second gear, it's absolutely insane what they expect you to do to change this fluid, so
of course most people are never going to attempt it themselves, and they'll
believe, oh it's a lifetime fluid, we'll just leave it in and not worry about it,
but that's a big mistake, because yes the metallurgy and the transmissions and the
modern synthetic fluids, are much better than they used to be, but look at this, I
took this out of a transmission that at 60,000 miles of lifetime fluid in it,
it's supposed to be red and you can see it's pretty much turned black, now 90% of
transmission failures occur because of heat, and the fluid has a lot to do with
that, dirty fluid will cause carbon buildup, the seals in the clutches will
start to burn out, the plates will slip, varnish forms, and you don't want all
that happen inside a clean automatic transmission, and dirty fluid causes
wear, the seals can get dirt on them from that, and then they'll start leaking,
you don't want to have dirty transmission fluid period, now sure
you don't have to change it every 30,000 miles like we used to in the old automatics,
but still, I would advise changing at least every sixty to eighty thousand
miles, if you want to keep your car a long time, so if you ask any honest
mechanic about this lifetime fluid, they'll tell you the truth, that it's a lot
of baloney if you want to keep your car a long time, and my automatic transmission
specialist in Baytown Texas, he says the same thing, and you'd think, hey if it did
wear them out, he'd make more money selling transmissions to people, but he's
honest, and he says you got to change this fluid if you want the transmissions to
last a long time, so now you know the truth about lifetime automatic
transmission fluids, that you really should change it, unless you like the
idea of short lifetimes, and remember if you've got any car
questions just visit the Scotty Kilmer channel, so if you never want to miss
another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!
