Picking up the Ralliart tomorrow, figured this story was worth sharing. The transmission gave out while my girlfriend was coming to meet me in Richmond. She hears a clunk and rolled into a turn lane right outside my apartment then managed to limp it into a parking lot after it decided it wanted to go back into gear after a restart. Figured it'd be a $2k or so fix and just wrote it off until I could deal with it so it didn't ruin the weekend. Got it towed to a Mitsubishi dealership the next morning and didn't really like what I heard. The guy said these transmissions are typically not serviceable and VERY expensive to replace. He even said he was going to hold off on the oil change/inspection in case I decided to ditch the car. This lead me to do some digging and oh boy are there some disgruntled Ralliart owners out there. 1) the transmissions rarely lives past 80k-100k miles 2) they're also $10k-12K to replace and install. Code. Fucking. Brown. This car is barely worth $10k as it sits. Not gonna lie I was panicking the whole weekend after that news. On one hand I couldn't really dump $10k into this thing but I also I couldn't scrap a car I owed close to $12,000 on. Found a few shops willing to do a rebuild on it for around $2-5k but that would mean getting it shipped off to Colorado or Texas and being down to one vehicle for close to a month. Figured I'd wait to hear the official new before worrying too much and left it at that.
Got a call on Monday morning that the repairs where "only" going to be $3900. There goes my signing bonus but at least it's not as bad as it could have been. They're replacing the valvebody and apparently the fluid change alone is $400. They're only charging me for 4 hours of labor and the rest is parts. It was trying to shift into 2 gears at once and that's what the issue was. I'm still going to dump this thing as fast as I possibly can once I have it back. There's at least 2 more things on this trans that lead to catastrophic failure: the shift fork and the torque damper spring. This was Getrag's first stab at a dual clutch transmission and apparently Mitsubishi thought a $35,000 car was the perfect lab rat for a $12,000 transmission ... WTF. They also put the service interval at 60k when most people who know anything about this type of transmission says 30k is probably much more realistic.
The dealership has been really cool though. They replaced my ACD pump under warranty even though the ecu was flashed. I know that definitely wasn't a cause for that failure since they slapped a poorly sealed fluid pump under the car, right behind the rear tire and hoped for the best. Spoiler: they pretty much all failed due to corrosion in no time. So much so they extended the warranty on them to 10 years/100k miles because they eventually realized how bad they fucked up but were rejecting people with any kind of tune. The guy at the shop told me not to worry about it since there was no way a basic off the shelf tuner would cause anything related to this issue. They rushed all the parts in and got done before the end of the week. I was already out of town expecting them to at least take a week to get the parts in and get it done so that was a surprise.
Sooooo now I get to drive this thing around knowing there's a $10,000 time bomb inside it until I can find a buyer, pray for me.
![[Image: giphy.gif]](https://media.giphy.com/media/A8mOE2k9WV0yc/giphy.gif)
Got a call on Monday morning that the repairs where "only" going to be $3900. There goes my signing bonus but at least it's not as bad as it could have been. They're replacing the valvebody and apparently the fluid change alone is $400. They're only charging me for 4 hours of labor and the rest is parts. It was trying to shift into 2 gears at once and that's what the issue was. I'm still going to dump this thing as fast as I possibly can once I have it back. There's at least 2 more things on this trans that lead to catastrophic failure: the shift fork and the torque damper spring. This was Getrag's first stab at a dual clutch transmission and apparently Mitsubishi thought a $35,000 car was the perfect lab rat for a $12,000 transmission ... WTF. They also put the service interval at 60k when most people who know anything about this type of transmission says 30k is probably much more realistic.
The dealership has been really cool though. They replaced my ACD pump under warranty even though the ecu was flashed. I know that definitely wasn't a cause for that failure since they slapped a poorly sealed fluid pump under the car, right behind the rear tire and hoped for the best. Spoiler: they pretty much all failed due to corrosion in no time. So much so they extended the warranty on them to 10 years/100k miles because they eventually realized how bad they fucked up but were rejecting people with any kind of tune. The guy at the shop told me not to worry about it since there was no way a basic off the shelf tuner would cause anything related to this issue. They rushed all the parts in and got done before the end of the week. I was already out of town expecting them to at least take a week to get the parts in and get it done so that was a surprise.
Sooooo now I get to drive this thing around knowing there's a $10,000 time bomb inside it until I can find a buyer, pray for me.