Quite possibly one of the most expensive repairs on your car, truck, SUV or any other motor vehicle is going to be a transmission. Transmissions are what allow you to change your gears and either compensate for speed or the load you are towing. It isn’t always easy to tell when your transmission is breaking down because let’s face it,  the darn thing just doesn’t always give off the best warning signs. After reading this article you can get an idea of a few things that should stir alarm on a struggling transmission. Also you will have a few good tips to help you prevent damage to your transmission. Depending on what kind of transmission you have this might vary quite a bit.

Manual Transmission or Stick

Okay so you have a manual transmission, or a standard as some call it. Look out for a sticking clutch pedal, when it presses down on the plate it might stick and not disengage. Also you might have what we call a slip which causes you not to be able to really go into different gears properly and move forward very fast or at all even. Other signs are of course when you just can’t move the stick because it won’t shift, in a lot of cases the stick gets stuck.

Automatic Transmissions

A lot of people these days just use automatic transmissions and these can be pretty obvious. When you are driving to do notice a little jerk as you are accelerating? Well that’s probably your gears slipping as you are speeding up and this is one of the most tell-tale signs of an automatic transmission going out.  Make sure you check your fluid often to make sure you have plenty of transmission fluid. Sometimes people hit curbs too hard and can break a hole in their transmission fluid pan which causes a leak, this can also cause your transmission to start to go. Without the lubrication it can start to slip gears which is tough on it.

For sealed transmissions which do not allow you to change the fluid or check it at all, you will need to go to a transmission specialist and get regular maintenance. In the long run it would be a lot less costly to do this than to let it go out on you.
One method of preventing a transmission from going out is to watch out for switching into reverse and quickly shifting into drive while you are in motion backwards still. This can cause wear on your gears which will in turn cause you to have to get a costly transmission repair a lot quicker than you had intended.

Hopefully in this short article you learned a little bit about how to tell when your transmission is going bad as well as a few easy tips to keep your transmission lasting a much longer time. Remember to keep up your maintenance because a transmission can cost you thousands to get replaced and is one of the most costly repairs you will ever get on your motor vehicle whether it is  a car, truck, SUV or otherwise.