Mark: Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local, we’re here with Bernie Pawlik of Pawlik Automotive, Vancouver’s best loved auto service experience, 16 plus time winners of Best Auto Repair in Vancouver, as voted by their customers. How’re you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Good.
Mark: So we’re going to talk about a Land Rover, a transmission service. What was going on with this, I’m assuming it was an automatic transmission.
Bernie: It was an automatic transmission. Most of the, most of the vehicles we service have automatic transmissions, so yeah the vehicle has about a hundred thousand kilometers and a client of ours just bought the vehicle and he’s a very conscientious maintenance customer, he wanted to make sure the transmission service was all up to date so we did our usual awesome transmission service that we do which includes removing the transmission pan, replacing the filter, cleaning the pan and then flushing the fluid so it’s basically like, it’s almost a hundred percent fluid replacement along with cleaning and service.
Mark: So is that what makes your service a bit different than most transmission services?
Bernie: Well, I think a lot of certainly a lot of places do not do a transmission service to the level we do it. There’s, you know, I mean it’s simple, there are various ways to do it. I think some I’m not going to say any names but there are some places that will do a transmission service by simply draining the fluid, putting the filler plug back in, sorry the drain plug back in, refilling the fluid and that’s the transmission service. Now that is, that will basically replace about one third of the fluid so you drive around two thirds dirty fluid, not a very good idea really you may as well almost not waste your money. The other way to do it is to just leave the pan in place and to just run a flushing machine and flush out the fluid which again is not, it’s not a bad service because it will replace most of the fluid but it doesn’t deal with what dirt or debris might be left in the pan. Now some transmissions don’t have a pan so those, the only way to deal with that tranny service is to do that kind of flush and we do those obviously but if it has a pan, a removal pan, we always do that. It’s better to do it less often but do it thoroughly, in my opinion.
Mark: So is there an automatic transmission fluid filter and does, is that, is that fluid a different fluid than we would normally expect?
Bernie: Well the fluid, the fluid depends on the vehicle but the filter on this vehicle, we’ll just talk about the Land Rover specifically, it does have a filter, it has a removable pan, however Land Rovers made this one an extremely difficult service, it takes several hours to actually take the pan on and off the vehicle, the exhaust system has to be removed, there’s transmission cross member in the way and then the transmission needs to be actually lifted up to get the pan off and they do another unique thing that makes the service even, even more expensive and that is and I’ll share, actually I’m not sharing the picture here, hang on for a sec, going to take, for some reason I’ve lost the photo so we’ll leave it but I’ll explain what’s happened. So the transmission pan on this vehicle is unique in that it’s a plastic pan and it has, it has a filter built into it so if you want to change the filter you have to change the pan, it’s a whole one piece unit and so that adds a fair bit of expense to the job, so again it’s not something that you need to do very often, every hundred thousand kilometers, maybe a little more often you know, enough to keep the service up to snuff.
Mark: So is that ATF or automatic transmission fluid, is that usually a synthetic fluid on most vehicles?
Bernie: Nowadays it is. In the old, the good old days, whenever that was, you know they used to be a fluid called Dextron 3 for most vehicles, the Ford would use a different type of fluid but it basically, everything used that type of fluid then you know, for the last 15, 20 years a lot of transmissions have gone to synthetics and pretty much everything now is synthetic fluid, usually unique to the vehicle and so yeah, pretty much everything’s synthetic, so it does last a lot longer but it still gets dirty, it still gets contaminated and it’s you know, you want to last the longest and keep the cost down, it’s, it’s well worth doing on a routine basis.
Mark: How often would you say?
Bernie: How often? Generally about every 100,000 kilometers and it used to be we’d recommend 50 so that’s a good jump up for time.
Mark: So with the Land Rover LR3 do you see a lot of transmission problems with these vehicles?
Bernie: No, they’re quite good, I mean, we do, we work on a wide range of cars; we do a lot of Land Rovers, never seen a transmission problem. I’m certain that some shops that do nothing but Land Rovers will see more, more of transmission problems but it’s not, it’s not a huge issue with them, they’re pretty good.
Mark: There you go, if you need some service on your Land Rover on your transmission the guys to call in Vancouver is Pawlik Automotive, you can reach them at 604-327-7112 to book your appointment or check out their website pawlikautomotive.com; years’ worth of videos on there, every week were doing this. Thanks a lot Bernie.
Bernie: Thanks Mark.
