maybe that statement was a little harsh considering diffs seem to fail at a high rate. But I still think the transmissions aren't up to the job based on how many I've seen with trans problems.

 

Sorry but you listing out three unidentified instances where an LR3 "needs a tranny" doesn't mean jack $hit. Plenty of times, an easy-to-remedy situation would be diagnosed as "$hit needs a tranny" so no, it doesn't hold any water.

I've been reading and posting on 3-4 LR3 message boards for 10 years. I've seen it all at this point. The engine and tranny are good. People can do stupid $hit and screw them up, sure...but by and large, they are good units.

 

With 16 yrs. experience in Land Rovers and 50 yrs. working on vehicles, the Achilles heel is always the lack of preventive maintenance by the owner. When you have vehicles reaching 200K or more in miles, this is due to the owner making sure all maintenance is done on an earlier scale than the manufacture's. All maintenance in the books are for normal driving in which there is no such thing.

 

Obviously you, Houm and Jag, have more experience than I do.

And lack of maintenance is by far the enemy to any vehicle.

The 3 "unidentified" instances I have personal knowledge of, so I don't feel the need to tow them to you for inspection. One of them being the vehicle I am driving.

So Houm, your experience on the forums trumps my experience, and I surrender. The transmissions don't fail or have problems on these vehicles.

 

Good. Glad we agree...

 

I just wish the previous owner(who had the trans rebuilt at 120k) and I (who swapped in a trans at 206k) would have had this conversation with you before.

Would have saved us a lot of money and time.

 

...what you should be wishing is that the previous owner would've changed the fluid out at about 90k miles. That way you could correctly aim your blame at a lack of maintenance instead of the tranny itself.

In the previous owner's defense (and yours, too) this sort of guidance was not provided by LR.

 

Luckily I don't need defending, as I bought the car with a bad trans. I will definitely keep up on the maintenance.

 

Yeah...I threw you in there. I was going to say "and you, to a lesser extent" but I was nit-picking on my prose at that point. My whole thing is that the tranny likely would've been fine if it had been maintained better. So did the re-build at 120k not work well? You say it had "a bad tranny" when you bought it; do you mean the rebuild was Tango Uniform when you bought the vehicle at 206k and hence needed yet another tranny? Would you go as far as to say the previous owner neglected the re-built tranny in the same way as the original tranny?

Anyway, what I was trying to say is that I haven't heard of a lot of entire trannies going ****. It's mostly been leaky sleeves or bad megatronics....or slippage because no one ever changed the fluid in 150k miles. That kind of thing. I think the ZF unit as a whole is a good one.

 

PO replaced trans and said they had not done a service before that. After rebuilding the trans they said they did a service at 50K miles(also mentioned it was very expensive) only to have the trans start to fail 30K miles later. Drove it with a slipping 2nd gear until i got too dangerous then gave up as they didn't want to rebuild it again.