@C-XRS2005 wrote:
Sorry to hear about you tranny. Buy a Toyota or Honda next time
Since I bought my first car in 1982 I have owned five cars:
5. I currently have a 2000 Camry with automatic tranny (bought in 2004)
4. Before that, a 1994 Corolla with manual tranny (bought in 1999)
3. Before that a 1988 Subaru with manual tranny (bought new)
2. Before that a 1984 Honda Civic with automatic tranny (bought new)
1. Before that a 1978 Buick Skylark (bought in 1982) , first car I ever owned, without going into detail I'll simply say this car was the reason I haven't bought a GM product since.
You will notice I keep them a while. None of them has ever needed a tranny rebuild, and I kept all of them for a lot more than 60K miles. On that Subaru the synchronizers failed about six months after I got the car, and a friend who was a mechanic advised me not to have them fixed because opening up the tranny to fix them could do more harm than good so I should just be careful to avoid grinding gears. That advice was apparently sound because I drove that car for a over 10 years without the synchronizers.
For those unfamiliar with stick shifts: once upon a time none had synchronizers so the driver had to be careful to match engine speed when shifting gears. Most manual trannies today have a mechanism that does this synchronization automatically, but as my experience demonstrates this is not an essential feature: with a modicum of care one can drive just fine without it (and my parents' generation took the need for manually synchronizing engine speed for granted).
That little Subaru had one other trivial failure early on: as in many cars the dome light had a three-position switch (on/off/door) which consisted of a piece of metal on a pivot so it could engage one of two contacts or none. Attached to the metal lever was a plastic handle that fell off six weeks after I got the car. Since it was just as easy to operate the switch by pushing directly on the metal lever, I never bothered to get that fixed either.
