rev up your engines, welcome to my Thursday video where I answer a viewers
question with an entire video and today's question comes from John 9180,
I got a Nissan Altima with the CVT transmission, the stupid thing went out
when it only had 80,000 miles on it, is this something with Nissan's or is it a
problem that a lot of CVT have, well it's definitely a problem with the Nissan
cvts, and to understand how that affects a lot
of other cars, here's a little history lesson, now Nissan which also makes infinitys
like this 2004 Infiniti used to make pretty good automatic transmissions, this
one is a 5-speed automatic that's pretty bulletproof, but the like everybody else
they started to get worries about gas mileage and they went to fancier
transmissions like 7 speed, 9 speed, and the more speeds they put in them, the
more problems that they have as they wore out, sometimes reprogramming the computer
software for these fancier transmissions, helped the problems to some extent
sometimes it didn't do that much, but they're getting so complicated to get
better gas mileage that they've gone to CVT transmissions and as with most new
innovations, there's teething problems, CVT transmissions were around even in my
grandfather's day, but the metallurgy was so bad then, they'd slip like mad they
couldn't make it up a big hill, a lot better than it used to be but they're
still not really perfected from a lot of manufacturers, from my own experience and
a poll that I did with all the transmission experts that I've known
over the years, pretty much it was 100 percent agreement that Nissan
makes the worst CVT transmissions out there, they have the most problems, they
last the shortest amount of time and they cost an awful lot of money to rebuild
correctly, now Nissan transmissions are made by a company called Jatco, that's
a subsidiary of Nissan and that stands for Japanese automatic
transmission company, so don't automatically think that just cause it's
a Japanese company they're gonna make a great product, Jatcos had a lot of
problems with the CVT transmissions they put in Nissans, but you may not know
Jatco supplies automatic transmissions to lots of companies, they
use them in Nissan's, Mazda, Subaru, Isuzu, Suzuki, BMW, VW, mg, Land Rover,
Hyundai, Jaguar, Renault, and Chrysler, now Toyota they make their own CVT
transmissions, they use the company Aisin which they own a percentage of and they
have probably the least amount of problems of any of the CVT is out there
and that's probably because they've been mass producing the CVT transmissions
longer than anyone and has perfected them, the Toyota Priuses have CVT
transmissions because they're using both a gasoline engine and electric motor
because in a hybrid car you got to have input from the electric motor and the
gasoline motor and the CVT transmissions are easier to make so you can have
different inputs, a regular transmission is really made for only one input coming
from a gasoline motor, since the Prius has been out for twenty years now they
just did their 20th anniversary, Toyota has been whipping out those CVT
transmissions for two decades, so they got a leg up on everybody else
and the other car manufacturer that makes CVT for themselves, is Honda now
Honda has had problems with their automatic transmissions over the course
of time in a lot of their models, I haven't seen the same problem yet in
their CV T's so I'm assuming Honda is doing a better job making the CVTs than
Nissan is using Jatco, so if you're thinking about getting a car with
a CVT transmission, you might learn something from John's question, he had a
Nissan Altima, his Jatco CVT transmission went out at an early age it
cost a fortune to fix, so if you're planning on buying a car that has a CVT
transmission, my advice is this, do a little research on who actually made the
transmission and if you find that it's made by Jatco that Nissan affiliate
personally I wouldn't buy the car, because who wants a vehicle with a bad
automatic transmission and you might ask, hey why are they even putting these CVT
transmissions in a lot of the cars, well it's for one main reason, gas mileage the
CVT transmissions don't have gears that shift up and down, they're always going
in what's called the optimum RPMs power speed and gas mileage, it's all
computer-controlled, you can't even shift the car to get the
good gas mileage those get, it's gonna do it better than any human
being and with the pressure on manufacturers to get better and better
gas mileage, they're going to be going to all these types of technologies and CVT
is one that is pretty much going to be a universal if you ask me in the future
for gasoline and diesel cars, and who knows maybe in the future Jatco will get
their act together and make really good CVT because you have to realize that the
use of the jaco transmissions, hey like in the case of Chrysler, they had a
six-speed dual-clutch transmission they were working on that was way behind
schedule, so as a last-minute thing, oh they decided we're gonna buy CVT from
Jatco, so they didn't have to do the research development who's to say that
it's a correct mix, they just kind of, oh well ours didn't work so let's try
something else and sticking it in on our cars, me I'll take decades of Engineering
like Aisin does with theirs that have been in Prius is for 20 years, they started
perfecting them and get them better and better and better, rather than a company just
saying oh I guess we can't make CVT ourselves, so let's buy them from somebody
else and throw them in our cars and see what happens, because slowly perfecting
things hey, it might be boring but everybody really wants a boring
transmission in their car that just keeps working and never breaks down and
you don't have to think about it, and since this is the Thursday segment where
I answer a viewers question, place your own question on the YouTube comments
below, and I'll pick the best ones to make a single video to answer your
questions, and where else can you find a guy with 50 years experience of fixing
cars to answer your own question with a video, so if you never want to miss
another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!