[themafia]

It's everywhere.

You design a new transmission to comply with federal regulations. The transmission is mostly an upgrade of previous designs and built in cooperation with multiple vendors. It's actually not a bad unit.

Which is a problem because it will be too reliable. So you take a small accessory component, like a valve body, and you undersize it and built it out of inappropriate materials. It now starves the transmission, causes it to run hot, and the nice transmission cooks itself to death under even the slightest load.

The hope is you won't even bother to buy and install a new $7000 part. Just scrap the car and get a new one!

If you're buying a new vehicle, find your favorite search engine, then search for "car model year reliability upgrade." You're almost certainly going to want to get a few of those done if you expect the car to be driving in more than 5 years.

[ourmandave]

I know brand loyalty can be iffy, but if you become known for your trans blowing up after 70K miles you're repeat buyers run away and fill the car reviews with 1-star warnings.

That's the rep Nissan has with their CVT transmissions.

You could also face a recall if enough of them do it.

https://www.jalopnik.com/1805274/worst-transmission-recalls-...

[jancsika]

> It's everywhere.

It's too bad that the dozens of old Prius models littering your grocery parking lot can't reply to you on HN.

[nkrisc]

That seems like a worse way to sell cars than just making decent ones. They don’t event have to be great.

[bluGill]

Across all the cars you made that $.10 savings per transmission adds up to a lot of money on the bottom line. So manufactures look for ways to cut costs.