Transmission Reliability

[m5james]

Originally Posted by willgabriel

Fair enough, and I understand and believe in personal responsibility. Yet, as this 2007 Consumer Affairs blurb shows, BMW's response to the transmission issues leaves much to be desired, and in fact, sounds too much like Ford when it came to the Pinto and Toyota about two years ago when they thought they could "get by" with distract and denial tactics. A day of reckoning is coming though ...

Transmission Failures Plague BMW Owners

That article sounds like an abridged version of www.noreverse.org and the same stories I've been reading about in the forums for years. Ironically, even reported at the end of the article, that BMW's sales continue to rise. Thank god for Car & Driver keeping the 3 series in the "10 Best Cars" category for as long as the magazine has been around...too bad most people don't do their homework until after they have a failure, then they see how widespread this issue is.

[JCL]

Originally Posted by willgabriel

So, how long do you think BMW anticipated the X5 transmission would last - under normal conditions - when they installed it? Beyond all the silly nonsense you are "funnin'" with, I'd like to hear a well-thought answer to this most pertinent question ...

Pick me, pick me....

From a technical perspective, you have to separate transmission failures into those that are due to wear-out, and which thus can be predicted in advance by oil sampling, clutch disk wear patterns, load testing, etc. We know from the X5 transmissions that have gone 200,000 miles that the X5 transmissions do have a reasonable life before being worn out. I would even go so far as to say that most if not all failures that we have seen are not due to wearing out, but rather random failures of smaller subcomponents. Those smaller components include plastic pieces in the torque converter, electrical sensors, actuators, software, and so on. The trouble with those sorts of failures is that they are far more random in nature, ie it is hard to draw a bell curve with a predicted reliability rate. (incidentally, it is also why there is such a debate on whether ever changing the transmission fluid really matters, given the nature of the failures that have been documented)

The likely commercial answer is that BMW expects transmissions to go at least 100,000 miles, since they offer extended warranties to that mileage, and such warranties do not appear to be heavily padded to cover the cost of any significant number of transmission failures. If I was the engineer involved in that program, I would have included a safety factor in that calculation, ie more than 100,000 miles.

[willgabriel]

Originally Posted by JCL

Pick me, pick me....

From a technical perspective, you have to separate transmission failures into those that are due to wear-out, and which thus can be predicted in advance by oil sampling, clutch disk wear patterns, load testing, etc. We know from the X5 transmissions that have gone 200,000 miles that the X5 transmissions do have a reasonable life before being worn out. I would even go so far as to say that most if not all failures that we have seen are not due to wearing out, but rather random failures of smaller subcomponents. Those smaller components include plastic pieces in the torque converter, electrical sensors, actuators, software, and so on. The trouble with those sorts of failures is that they are far more random in nature, ie it is hard to draw a bell curve with a predicted reliability rate. (incidentally, it is also why there is such a debate on whether ever changing the transmission fluid really matters, given the nature of the failures that have been documented)

The likely commercial answer is that BMW expects transmissions to go at least 100,000 miles, since they offer extended warranties to that mileage, and such warranties do not appear to be heavily padded to cover the cost of any significant number of transmission failures. If I was the engineer involved in that program, I would have included a safety factor in that calculation, ie more than 100,000 miles.

Fair answer. Thanks. I look forward to hearing/reading what BMW says when they are asked the same question under examination ...

[Quicksilver]

100% end of story.

[Quicksilver]

Exactly;

Before taking on those crooks in court might be a good idea
to find out which transmission are you talking about,
what failure do you mean? Is it the floor mat, or the
electronics. Is it consumer error (off roading peeling rubber?)
or is there some other issue like changing the fluid....

Sorry I couldn't resist. I did ask my "master mechanic"
about this issue and he said that it depends on which
transmission your talking about. What year X5? What model?
He explained that the failure rate isn't any worse than it
has been in the past and he has seen few transmissions
that needed to be replaced.........

[Penguin]

One of the problems in the U.S. is the power of the dealers. Historically, the auto dealers were one of the "pillars of the community" supporting lots of local civic things. This led to them having lots of influence on the individual state legislators. As a result, lots of the states have very restrictive laws as to the conditions under which an auto manufacturer can pull a dealer's franchise. The U.S. car manufactures have been trying to cut the number of dealers for the past 20 years or so, but these restrictive laws have been in the way, often resulting in the manufacturers paying large sums of money to the existing dealers just so they can close their dealership. Because of this, the auto manufacturers have limited ability to bring bad dealers in-line with corporate policy and desires.

As an example of the dealer's historic political power, many U.S. States have laws prohibiting car dealers from being open for business on Sunday -- the dealers essentially got together and figured that if they all closed on Sunday they would all still sell the same amount of cars, but they wouldn't have to have their salespeople work on Sunday.