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I have personally rebuilt a ZF 4HP-18, an OG 900 auto tranny, several British sports car manual transmissions, several US Detroit iron transmissions of various types and have owned SAABs for nearly 30 years.
IMHO the this particular ZF is a very clever, BUT light duty design for the 9K application. I base this conclusion on the relative sizes of the clutches, bearings, and seals. Also, I have experienced firsthand the effect of the unfortunate engineering choice of lightweight alloy for the 'A' accumulator spring and seen the embrittlement of the steel seals on the turbine shaft and governor due to their size, alloy composition, and exposure to internal heat.
I have talked with Eriksson's on numerous occasions, and have been left with the impression that the areas discussed above are well-known to them as common repair points with this unit. Furthermore, from the SN URL below, I obtained the following from a(n) (unscientific) survey of 9K owners:
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Automatic Transmissions: 83% of owners report having an automatic
transmission failure. The average life is 100k miles/160k km. In very cold climates, the average life is around 75k miles/120k km. Typically, shifting gradually deteriorates until the car can no longer be drive! n. The replacement cost is very expensive. Some owners have reported horror
stories about rebuilt units which have failed after another 30k miles!
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Having said all of that, it is clear that the type of driving will affect the lifetime of any mechanical device in the dirvetrain. Again, IMHO the driver will have a bigger impact on the lifetime than the relatively small differences in torque or HP between the 2.0L and 2.3L turbos. All three of my 9K's are automatics, but I would not recommend buying a 9K with an automatic to someone who had to depend on others to perform repairs on their cars - certainly without knowing the owner history of the car, including maintainence/repair history and never for an automatic-equipped car with >100K mi.
I really like the 9K for a variety of reasons (and none of them masochitic), but it would be foolish to ignore the statistics/data from a variety of sources concerning common experiences with various component failures.
SteveB
posted by 165.170.12...
http://www.saabnet.com/tsn/faq/part1.html
, Wed, 10 Jul 2002 23:16:09, Thu, 11 Jul 2002 00:44:17
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