My tranny locked up on me today it goes into gear but wont move,i finally got it home called dealer to pick-up mon.had the tranny rebuilt 12000 miles ago by Chrysler garage,i will ask them to buy it back I cant go through this again, it has 62,000 miles on it. Rick ncpa

 

Dodge provides a factory warranty for new vehicles and also for factory repairs. If it's out of warranty, you will be treated like millions of other unlucky customers who own 6 year old vehicles.

They will not be buying it back unless you are trading in on another vehicle and they will not eat the cost of the tranny repair. If you barely missed the warranty window both times, this sounds like incredible bad luck that falls well outside any state lemon law (with a buy back obligation). I suspect the 4.0L SOHC has more torque than the 6spd is capable of handling. The 4L motor has even more torque than a new 3.6L. This tranny is a direct descendant of the 3.3/3.8 4spd and it is not designed for such a high torque engine. If you often get deep in the throttle and drive aggressively, it may continue to fail at an unacceptable rate. Folks who seldom use full throttle will not overstress the tranny, so it will last much longer.

I heard a design change was made to some internal 6spd tranny components to strengthen it a bit (somewhere around 2010).

 

it also means what ive heard this tranny be out of market soon too. Chrysler probably knows issues and is going to be replacing it in there newer gen vehicles. .

 

It's really not that surprising this tranny is near end of production life. This 6 spd was a spin-off from the 20 year old 4 spd design which was a spin-off from the 35 year old ancient K-car 3spd.

I think the latest version of the tranny has been beefed up and tweaked to handle the 3.6 without issues. However the shift programming is terrible and apparently can't be improved due to design limitations. For example, the transmission is incapable of downshifting from 6th into 5th. It has to drop into 4th then upshift back up to 5th. It's a really hokey setup with various shortcomings. The upshifts are very late in 2nd and 3rd and it can't lock to improve economy. Ratios are poor and so on.

A few 2008 and newer caravans came with paddle shift 6 sped getrag tranny according to parts listings. I'm not sure if any of these came to the USA.

 

Are you saying you've been in the industry that long? In any case, you have been and will be a great asset to this forum.

 

No, I'm not "in" the industry. However I have close associations. For example, a number of close friends repair transmissions and know the 4spd was a spin-off of the older 3spd. Chrysler literature indicates the current 6spd is no more than a modified 4 spd. This is the reason I know this basic tranny design is 35 yrs old. It was not a clean design which led to necessarily quirky shift behaviors. It's kinda mickey mouse and efficiency is poor in lower gears due to lack of torque converter locking capability. I believe this particular 6spd has been in production for about 7 yrs, so it's overdue for replacement by any measure.

 

Thanks sooo much for the help,the dealer picked the van up this morning,dropped off a caliber to use,i did buy extra insurance on the eng,tranny,ect it runs out at 85,000 miles I have 67,---.I just want to get rid of this now but I bought it a 1.5 years ago,it should not cost me anything to fix the tranny the 2nd time I hope, Rick

 

I have read about an upgrade to the gearsets in this tranny sometime in 2009 so they should be reman the tranny using these upgraded parts or simply pull the tranny and replace it with a reman. The problem had something to do with some flimsy pressed parts. Hopefully they don't get in there to just make minimal repairs.