Dave Hinz wrote:

>
> Can you provide a cite for your 99% figure? It looks to me to be,
> what's the term? Oh yeah, "pulled out of your ass". A breakdown of the
> failure modes, since you seem to have the statistics, would be oh ever
> so welcome.

Yeah, I did pull it out of my ass, but a number on the high side of 80%
is just about right. No one, many dealers included, knew how to diagnose
the things when they first came out. There are two sensors in it, either
one of which can trigger "limp mode." VERY often, entire trannies got
swapped because of that.

And I'm not denying that the early transverse A-604 (the one that became
the 41TE) had some real hardware problems- it certainly did. But the
biggest of those were fixed by the 1993-94 time frame, and most of them
never affected the 42LE version at all. There were a few more upgrades
through the years, to the point that these days its quite rare to read
about transmission problems in the rec.autos.makers.chrysler newsgroup-
unlike 1995 when upwards of half the posts were about transmission
problems, mostly in minivans.

>
> Are you one of the engineers responsible for this abomination,

No, I don't work in the automotive industry at all. But I am an engineer
and a car hobbyist. I've got a couple of good friends who used to be
dealer mechanics (at an exceptional dealership in terms of technical
expertise) who have explained the whole sequence of events, what was
really wrong, and what "common practice" was. I've also participated in
re.autos.tech and rec.autos.makers.chrysler for over 12 years now, and
I've seen the A-604 problems disappear from the discussions firsthand.

or why
> are you defending the heap of **** in question so vehemently, please?


Because in the first place, it isn't a "heap of ****." And in the second
place, as a working engineer, I have an understanding of how innovative
systems (and the A-604 WAS groundbreaking- it was the first production
fully electronic transmission) develop over time- including cases like
the A-604 where the management a-holes that run companies pushed the
engineers to get it in production before it was ready. It ****ES me off
to see ignoramuses who don't know a snap-ring from a bellville spring
continue to verbally smear crap on a piece of engineering over 10 years
after the problems have been resolved to the point that the CURRENT
product has an industry-leading (or near it) reliability rate. And it
****ES me off to see ignoramuses spew forth in public forums with the
ASSumption that "new designs" (or worse yet German or Japanese designs)
are always better. Hell, the A-604 was the "new design" in 1989, and for
a while it DEFINITELY wasn't better than anything! The new 5-speed
Daimler transmission may be great (and in fact there haven't been any
complaints that I've read in r.a.m.c about it) but at the moment, the
41TE has become highly proven, and the new one is a relative unknown.