I was climbing a steep incline and shifted to autostick to downshift to 3rd and keep it there. I accidentally shifted to 2nd for about 2 seconds. The car runs fine except it now has a very slight noise when accelerating from a complete stop and no noise otherwise. It really is more a feel than a noise. I initially thought it was like a clutch slipping but it only does it when accelerating from a stop slowly. When you accelerate from a stop briskly it becomes a harder jolt... again not really a sound. Rolling stops and normal driving does not cause this jolt/slight noise/vibration to occur. Only when accelerating from a stop. I read a lot of comments from this forum and had the dealer check the motor mounts. They stated that the front mount was leaking fluid and the rear was not but sloppy and recommended both be changed for $547. $99 for each mount and 3.5 hours labor to replace both. I went ahead and did it and will let everyone know if this solved it after I get it back. This noise was very minor and could have probably lived with it for 50k miles but I can't stand having something not quite right with the car.

 

Dealer replaced both the front and rear motor mounts and that solved my problem. Drives like new again.

 

So the mistaken downshift had nothing to do with the noise huh?

 

I would doubt that the mistaken autoshift would cause any damage. Shifting of the transmission is really controlled by the computer. The autostick input is sort of like a "suggestion" that the computer will ignore if it deems it inappropriate.

 

Not sure how you'd make that leap.

The car didn't clunk prior to shifting into 2nd at 70 mph. Minutes after that it did when accelerating from a stop. The next day I had dealer replace the mounts. Whoaaa. No clunking when accelerating from a stop.

Two things Chrysler screwed up....

1. They allowed the computer to let me shift into 2nd at 70 mph.
2. Their driveline components should have been able to handle that.

The motor mounts fail on the Pac when under high torque load conditions and primarily on the AWD. Possibly due to good traction combined with a torque along with poor motor mount design.

 

Search this forum for motor mount and see how many have failed when performing hard acceleration.

70 mph is the upper limit of 2nd.

 

Help me out, Cotter. Climb a steep grade w/ Autostick in 4th at 70 mph and rapidly downshift to 2nd. Let me know if your car lets you do it.

 

I conduct a car reliability survey at TrueDelta.com, and one thing I didn't expect was how often motor mounts fail in many different 250+ horsepower cars. They seem to be under-engineered in many cases.