AudiWorld Forums - Audi A8 Transmission Problems

Quote:

Originally Posted by igotav8 (Post 24167318)

All good points. I will say that in 30 plus years as an auto tech I've never ever seen an automatic transmission that benefited from no preventative maintenance. If you do a full flush and the tranmission dies it was going to die shortly anyway. Past experience shows that without proper maintenance you WILL get less life out of your automatic. Full flushes are important even with high miles. I've flushed many high mileage autos including my own and have never had a problem related to the flush. And certainly changing part of the fluid without changing the filter is a exercise in futility. Anything that comes loose due to the detergent in the new fluid is going to end up in your already plugged filter. Then you've almost certainly doomed your transmission.

Thanks for that info from an educated point of view.

The "no maintenance" thing has been a point of much discussion, esp on another forum I frequent.
Not that it makes it correct, but Audi voices that "opinion" when discussing the "lifetime" fluid and NO scheduled maintenance. ZF says they never told them that, when supplying the transmissions.
One example I know to be true: 2 owners of same year A8...1 did atf/filter change every 30K miles...the other did nothing ever...both trans's died at 185K miles, which is well above the average for a D2 A8. This doesn't really prove anything with only 2 cars, but the general consensus, maintenance or no maintenance, these tran's rarely last beyond 150K miles no matter what.
Of those who have posted on forums I read, there seems to be no clear answer....many believe not touching them, if there's no issue and many of these have sailed well beyond 150K miles. Many who stuck to a strict atf/filter change schedule seem to get no more mileage than others...maybe not scientific, but a rough "indication" nonetheless.
At about 100K miles, I did a simple (7+ liters..no flush) atf/filter change ONLY because of a slight shifting issue that was developing...an intermittent hard downshift to 1st. Issue went away completely and I was happy to see an almost clean pan and magnets...plus feel better with a new filter. Without the shift issue, though, I probably would not have done anything.