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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!