Hi.

My car is an Audi A3 1.8L 1998 model. I’m having serious trouble with the automatic gearbox in this car for the past 5 month and I desperately attempted to locate the problem and fix it but with no luck. The problem is as follows:

After 10 min of driving on the high way with a speed greater than 140 KPH the gear box will stop functioning properly, when I reduce my speed, the gear down shifts but never up shifts again. That means it will shift from 4th to 3rd to 2nd but would not shift up to 3rd or 4th again. And if I had to make a full stop, the car will only run at first gear unless I fully accelerate and make the RPM reach 6000 RPM then it shifts to second, and the same with third and fourth gear.

I seem to also get this problem when I’m stuck in traffic for a long time. The car stops shifting gears again.

Ironic as it might sound all I have to do is switch off the engine and turn it back on after 5 min, and the gear starts working again but not for a long time.

In this model, there is no error warning for the gear. But, sometimes when I switch off the engine and start it back on after the gear has stopped working, I hear a long beep which sounds like the one of the fuel lever warning and the speedometer goes all the way to 260 KPH and back.

This problem started 8 month ago and I took the car to the audi dealer for a checkup. They told me it’s only missing 500ml of gear oil. The car was perfectly fine after that for a couple of month then it started happening again. at that time I discovered that the gear box is missing some oil again hence I have a leak. However after fixing this leak the problem seems to still exist. And especially now it happens very frequently.

I have no idea how I’m going to handle this problem. Cause changing the gear box will be extremely expensive where I am and plus I’m not really sure if the problem is from the gear box it self. It looks like an electronic problem rather than mechanical.

What is funny I saw 4 other A3 of the same production date with the exact same problem at one work shop.

I had the car checked by at least 4 different mechanics and they all failed to find out the problem. I lost allot of $$ trying to fix it but no luck so far.

Dose any one have any idea what is going on here?????

Please contact me at hani_janem@hotmail.com if you have any information that could be useful to my case
Any advice will be appreciated.

Regards
Hani A Janem

[&o]

 

Sorry to say but it does sound like the gearbox is having a problem and just needs changing, it's possible that valves are geting stuck inside the gearbox when it hot e.g motorway driving or the pump in the gearbox is worn and can't pump enough pressure when the viscosity of the oil is reduced as it heats up. You could proberly try to find sevral other cheap ways to fix it but this will just end up costing you more money as you will have to replace the gearbox in the end.