Questions and Answers

Volkswagen T3 Slipping Shift Q. I have a question which I hoped you could answer. I've got a 1990 Volkswagen T3 Transporter, with an automatic transmission. The transmission is suddenly giving some problems I'm not familiar with.

1. When I put the transmission to Drive, it doesn't drive at all, until you fully depress the throttle. The engine makes al lot of revs, and suddenly the car leaps forwards, and drives pretty much the way it should.

2. Second to third gear shift doesn't work the way it should. When the car reaches a speed of about 60 kph, the second gear disengages and it should shift to a higher gear, but its seems to slip, and it takes about five seconds to shift. At that point, the engine again runs at a very high speed (seems like very low to no torque at all).

Here in Belgium the garages are not that familiar with automatic transmissions, so the only thing they could do is to send it to a specialized shop. The strange thing about the problem is that it occurs pretty occasionally, although the second to third gear shift problems happens quite often.

I already changed ATF, it says it should be Dexron, but I think that Dexron II/Dexron II-D should work perfectly. What can be the failure here? I hope you can give me an answer.

Thanks in advance,
Jelmer

A. That transmission takes AF2 Dexron II Automatic Transmission Fluid, so you're putting the correct fluid in. So I assume that when you replaced the transmission fluid, you replaced the transmission filter as well.

Without knowing the milage but it must be fairly high considering the age of the vehicle I would not recommend a transmission flush.

So it seems that the problem is internal to the transmission. With the transmission fluid and filter change you have just about done all you can do.