I'm about to change the transmission filter in order to look for metal. Hopefully there wil not be any.

I test drove the hell out of this car start stop and all the gears. The car was cold when I got to it. Now the transmission does not jump into any gear for the first use of everyday. After that scare it seems to work very well throughout the rest of the day. No codes display in the dash. I'll update after I change the filter.

 

I pulled the pan. Assuming the filter was never changed before there was not a lot of metal shavings in the pan. The magnet was thoroughly covered in a black soot. I'm not sure if that soot is metal shavings turned black or what. I assume it is. I don't know how to look at the old filter and tell whether or not it's bad.

After resinstalling and racing the engine for 3 minutes I toggled through all of the gears. I can pull the shifter into all the gears but when i get to "L" gear the shifter does not lock into place. The dash indicator says I'm in "L." It feels like i can blow the shifter from L back into "3"

Is this normal for this car? I'm thinking that my once a day shifting may have something to do with this if it's not normal.

 

It's almost been two weeks since i changed the filter and added some walmart ATF4. It stopped it's prerequisite daily slip until yesterday. I turned the car on after driving around and it would not get into any gear.

Because it does not go into any gear I dont actually think the transmission is the cause. I'm thinking it's the gearbox or a sensor. I'm going to do some personal research on these two things shortly. Has anyone else changed either of parts to fix a similar tranny issue?

Also I've had a chrysler before and when that car's transmission slipped I couldn't reverse but I could use Drive. Or vice versa. I would also lose engine power while driving. None of that is happening here. This is why I dont think i have an actual tranny issue. any thoughts?