OK I did transmission fluid flush on my 02 4.4i

[sunny5280]

Originally Posted by JCL

Completely agree.

But I would respectfully point out that consensus implies a large sample, and you are holding your example out as proof to the contrary, in a case where n=1.

I would not expect you to have had a problem after changing your fluid, as more transmission will be fine post fluid change than will fail. But we are discussing the risk of failure, statistically, not whether they will all fail. And on the other side of the coin, you don't know that your transmission wouldn't still be running fine with the original fluid. You spent the money, got no return on that investment, and arguably increased your risk. Is that an investment decision you recommend all should make?

No, I am holding the 25+ years of experience of my indy mechanic as evidence. As I said he worked for a local BMW dealer for 25+ years. In his experience he has not observed any correlation between changing the fluid and subsequent failure.

Likewise I have seen no supporting data anywhere to support this theory. If you've got some hard data I will be happy to take a look at it and reconsider. Until such time all we have are a number of anecdotes that form the "consensus". There could be any number of reasons for why a transmission failed after a fluid change. The most obvious being it was done incorrectly (which could be reason enoug to avoid doing it). It's not uncommon for work to be performed in an incorrect manner with problems as a result.