Originally Posted By: disturban
Just change your fluid with a good synthetic and add a pint of red Lubegard and call it a day. By the way I see people on here changing their fluid after 30,000 [censored]? Total waste of money...if you run synthetic every 100,000 miles is fine, conventional should be changed every 50,000. This is for normal driving and operating temperatures though. If your towing, racing or other severe duty conditions I would change it sooner. My 1988 Suburban has 286,000 miles 1/2 of them are towing campers and boats. Tranny fluid changed every 75,000 miles with synthetic and one pint of Lubegard red...it still works like it did the day it was bought in 1988! 30,000 miles is like changing your oil every 1500 miles!
disturban,Normally I would agree with you %100 in what you stated above.However the early U140F AWD trans.in my RX was a problem trans.due to planetary gears not being strong enough( of course they have updated parts for them now) Steel shaft vs.Aluminum,6 planetary gears vs 4 etc.And of course this is only some of the problem with this particular transmission.the bottom line is this; it`s very hard on fluid and the Type-IV just doesnt hold up at all in it,so forget about going 50k on standard fluid. I change every 10-15k with Synthetic and keeping my fingers crossed.
I think what bugs me the most about this is Toyota knows their was a problem with it,and they simply will not fess up and put out a recall on this thing.They better hope that their is no major accident due to this weak pos,because all the money they may have saved looking the other way just might be lost at that point.I like my RX very much,checked out Consumer-Reports and all that jazz before we bought it.It`s rated extremely well,(even for the transmission)
But then as I did more research (after buying of course) is when all of this stuff re; the transmission popped up.Hence my signature "over 100k on the original trans" So far though I am very satisfied and cant yet complain.