To flush, or not to flush?
 

I own a '04 A6 3.0 Quattro. It currently has about 66k miles on it and I just took it in last week for an oil change. I asked the service tech about getting the transmission serviced and his response was that the A6 has lifetime fluid and it doesn't need to be serviced. This is something I'm not used to hearing as every car I've owned, I've serivced the tranny every 30-50k miles.

Should I heed the service tech's words, or do I need to flush and fill the tranny??? If I do service the tranny, what fluid do I go with?

Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Please do a search, this has been covered a lot and will only start another argument.

It's not as simple as just changing the fluid out on a normal car, it wasn't designed to be easy to do because of the claim Lifetime fluid, so at least understand that. If you do plan on doing it, you could be opening up a whole other can of worms that you don't want; if you're prepared for that, then go ahead - some people don't have any problems and other times we've had reports of tranny's failing soon after a fluid change (typically in high mileage cars). I personally don't think it's worth it, but there will be equally as many people who think otherwise. You're at about the right amount of miles for you either to completely forget about it or to constantly do it every 30-50k like normal with little risk to your car.

On a note about the high mileage cars: the reason that we've seen a few fail from a fluid change is because of all the sediment and gunk that has held things together gets loosened up when you put fresh new fluid in. Normally, you'll have to change your fluid/filter once more after a couple weeks to really clean out the system (the filter really takes a hit and will cause problems otherwise). I think we're all on the same page about that.

I'm planning on doing mine this weekend. 01 2.7T with tip and 114K miles. I have been getting an occasional code thrown that is common to see when the torque converter seal is weak, DTC 17125 (Torque converter clutch circuit performance or stuck off).

I've have the VAG-COM so I can monitor temperature of transmission, and I ordered two filter kits, so I can do it again in a few weeks.

I also recoded the tip using the 00032 coding which apparently increases the pump pressure by 2psi, since I've done this, it hasen't thrown the code.

I may be overly optimistic, but I'm hoping the fresh fluid and recode will fix the problem, at least for a while. The car still drives great.

Nah, you're screwed. Once the TCC gets stuck changing the fluid won't do anything. Im not gonna stop you from wasting you money though.

As for changing the fluid, the only way i will suggest changing the fluid is if the fluid is actually leaking from the trans, or the torque converter fails. Changing the fluid on a tiptronic trans is a daunting task even for the most experienced weekend warrior mechanics. I would monitor the trans pan every time you change the oil and make sure it isn't leaking, if its not, don't mess with it. The fluid in theory, will last forever.

See, thats funny... many have told me that too, except my manual says to change it every 45k...

Sadness :( Anyone wanna buy a 2.7T?? :rolleyes: Kidding. At the very least, the fresh fluid should clean things up a little for the rebuild/upgrade, so the tranny can then handle new K04's :D

Well...here's something interesting you may want to know. I contacted a couple Audi dealer service centers and each time, the tech I spoke to was very firm in stating you shouldn't mess with the transmission at all until at least 100k miles. However, something told me to visit the Audi USA site and I found some interesting information. On the site you can obtain Scheduled Service Maintenance Interval sheets for the various years starting with 2004. If you read down the list, you'll get to the Continuously Variable Transmission (multitronic) and if you slide your finger over, it states that the fluid should be changed 35/75k miles.

Here's a link you can use to get to it, it comes up in .pdf format.

http://www.audiusa.com/audi/us/en2/e..._schedule.html

I wonder if Audi knows what the service departments are saying to folks???

On the phone now with Audi USA to inquire about the discrepancy in information.

Thank you. Audi is full of shitte with thier 'it lifetime fluid'. NO fluid is lifetime.

CVT and ZF tiptronic are two different transmissions. ZF's definition of life time is 100,000 miles. You can look that up on the ZF site. As for the flush vs not, I personally believe in changing, NOT FLUSHING, transmission fluid. I did that around 70,000 miles and I definitely noticed the difference in shifting.

However, changing a ZF 5H19FL transmission fluid is not as simple as changing a fluid on a turbo350 per say...