Seems like every car ad I see of the auto prelude has a rebuilt tranny. I talked to this one guy and he rebuilt his auto tranny twice already.

I was thinking about buying a 97 auto for $6000 with only 80K on it but I bet this cars got some tranny problems to.

Anyone know any info on this then holla back please.

 

The auto trans in a 97 up is not the best transmission in the world, but it's not the worst either. I got mine with 36,000 on it b/c it was 2,000 less than the stick, but I wish I had bought the stick b/c now I'm going to do a swap that will cost me 2 grand. However, my car now has 84k on it and the transmission still goes alright. I trash on it hard core and it has never failed me. It makes noised from park to reverse and shifts hard, but that's about it. Straight up buy the stick version. It's better and more enjoyable.

 

I really dont know becuase Im a 4th gen owner but there are constantly threads on how much the auto tranny sucks. Just from H-T, I would never purchase an auto 5th gen prelude. Just my .02

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by MNsnowdaboy &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Seems like every car ad I see of the auto prelude has a rebuilt tranny. I talked to this one guy and he rebuilt his auto tranny twice already.

I was thinking about buying a 97 auto for $6000 with only 80K on it but I bet this cars got some tranny problems to.

Anyone know any info on this then holla back please.</TD></TR></TABLE>

It may look like a good deal, but I bet that 97 is out of warranty. That means if yours does die on you, you have to eat the $2-3000 that the dealer will charge to rebuild the transmission, OR spend the $2-3000 to get an auto-manual swap.

Best to avoid the hassle and look for a manual in the $8-9000 range or less.

pm me for more info, as I have DONE the swap.

 

there have been a lot of problems with 5th gen auto trannies, with various symptoms, but most of them result in a rebuild. they were one of the original sportshift trannies on the market.

like someone else said, not the worst auto out there, but definitely something to steer clear of.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by kablamo &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">there have been a lot of problems with 5th gen auto trannies, with various symptoms, but most of them result in a rebuild. they were one of the original sportshift trannies on the market.

like someone else said, not the worst auto out there, but definitely something to steer clear of. </TD></TR></TABLE>
i totally agree about the original ss on the market. i think honda just wanted to release the ss out before many other car manuf. but too bad it isn't real reliable. i think this very act tarnished the honda reliability stigma. but i stll love honda.

also, i rebuilt mine around 80k miles. paid about 1900 parts and labor.

anyways, i believe the person you talk to about having his tranny rebuilt twice either 1. had a bad shop do it. 2. just drives the car really hard core all day.

from a technical aspect.. the car your looking at is a great price. even with the ss being faulty. cause 5spds are rare to find. (in philadelphia area.. about 50 mile radius for a good price that is)

anyways, gl on ur decision.

 

I got a 97 prelude with an ss tranny and it is already slippin on me. My car has about 90k on it and i bought it half a year ago. The engine is running strong but i gotta do somethin about the tranny. By the way, that $6g prelude is a steal. I bought mine for $10,000. But you also get what you pay for...

 

id buy the prelude and invest in a 5 speed swap. even if you spend the money for a 5 speed swap...your still getting the car for dirt.

 

you can spend 1900 on a rebuild or 2000 on a 5spd swap

 

i drive a 97 lude ss and has 132000 miles on it n the tranny is fine,i never heard of a tranny rebulit fot a 5 gen lude befor,but anyway ss suck *** i should have got a manual 4 speed plus heavy body weights. so i did a weight reduction, no back seat no 6x9 no trunk liner guted everything,

 

Okay.......so for the people who had issues....tell me what's the problem.

Hopefully when I go and test drive it then I'll notice the problem, don't want to invest in a car and then a week later I finally realize I have a problem.

I mean does it not shift when your on the auto/stick. Or does it slip like if you've got a bad clutch.

Let me know please and thanks guys for all the info.

 

Here is my take on this. I went off and got my TC redone by IPT perfomance, and I ordered the Rebuild kit from level 10 and got that kit CRYO Treated for added strenght. I will be boosting soon and I will keep you guys posted

 

Watch for really hard shifts, especially when your going from Park to Reverse, Park to Drive, etc. Also, listen and make sure it doesn't make creaking noises or have a hesitation while doing those shifts. My '98 started doing the above, a few months ago I shelled out $2700 for a rebuild. Now I kick myself everytime I think what a retard I was for not doing a 5spd conversion.

 

Ok... I'm going to give you the full story:

I purchased my 1998 Honda Prelude Base model in 1998. I am the original owner of the car.

The SS (Sequential Sportshift) tranny's is wonderfully convienent from a use standpoint. You can wind the gears out to 7400 RPM and shift into the next gear, and even though it's a 4 speed, you can give a 4th gen Si a serious run for his money. (At about 130MPH they start to pull away from you, I've got first hand experience with that.)

In traffic, it's fantastic. No clutch, you just put it in auto mode and drive...

For me, at around 9000 miles I started to note that in reverse the tranny would hard shift into gear (aka bang into gear) on cold days.

I took the car to Honda and they told me that "All Honda's do that."

At around 20,000 miles it started to have problems intermittantly when shifting from 3rd to 4th gear at about 75MPH.

Honda couldn't find anything wrong, and didn't seem to be trying.

Finally, at about 32000 miles the tranny complete blew up.

It took 2 months to get my car back as it took THAT long to get a rebuilt transmission.

My second transmission starting to have problems one day when I wound 3rd gear out to 105MPH and them shifted into 4th gear. There was a thud and from that point on the transmission would shift poorly (hard shift) from 3rd to 4th whenever I was accellerating and going 70MPH or higher (and only while accellerating).

I took it to Honda and told them about the problem.

They took at look at it and said nothing was wrong with it. (Keep in mind that the problem could be re-created EVERY SINGLE TIME!)

So, I then decided to swap the transmission out to a manual because clearly Honda didn't have a clue as to WTF they were doing (and we're talking about two of the better dealers in the NJ area).

It turns out that once I got the car swapped to manual I started to experince odd problems with the tachometer (needle would jump like the tranny was slipping) and the engine would cut off.

The short story is that I had a bad distributor (RPM's are read off the distributor by the computer). Two Honda dealers couldbn't find the problem and were unwilling to drive the vehicle at a high enough speed (70MPH, which meant that everyone on the highway in NJ would be passing them) in order to determine there was a problem.

In short, again, if you get an SS Auto you will be on your own troubleshooting any issues you have.

I beat the crap out of the replacement unit (I wanted to know if all of the tranny's had my first one's problems). I can honestly say that it was a GOOD unit. The car did not have the ***** that it originally did. That's because Honda silently lowered the stall speed on the replacement units.

The only person that won in my tranny saga was the guy I sold my SS Auto too for $500.00. He got a working transmission and was fairly happy.

For the record:

Honda had bad clutches and bearings in the various model year SS Autos.

If you get a 2000 or 2001 model the trannies are covered to 100,000 miles.


I suppose the only thing that's going to be cool going forward is that one of my buddies is giving me a lightened flywheel and a Quaife LSD... So that'll make things a little nicer now that I've got a manual tranny.

 

I did the swap for 700 even

Mounts, intermediate shaft, all hydraulic lines and mastercylinder, pedals, ECU, shifter assembly, tachometer, clutch, jdm tranny

The whole nine yards... Swapped it over in a weekend.

 

As Gerhard implies there are several reasons for SS tranny failures. Our 99 has 34K on the odometer and runs like brand new. Granted this is a low mileage car. Another point is that the tranny gets drained after an HPDE weekend. Open road the car does everything it is supposed to. In SS mode it shifts as it should. My only complaint is that the torque convertor takes a while to spool up and you can be left (in Auto mode) sitting rather than moving.
I took the car in to my dealer (I bought it brand new) and asked about the way the tranny was working-my tech there took it out for atest with me in the car. This tech has over 23 years with Honda and explained a lot of the operation of the tranny to me-including the slow spooling. Remember one thing about the 5th gen-it is a touring car first and a hot rod second. It will perform very well in SS mode if you do not push it beyond its design limits. I have no idea where that point is-but many here have found it. I rarely shift over 7000 simply because the power band ends at 7400-yes I've bounced off the limiter by accident ONCE.

I cannot argue why the tranny fails-only give my observations on the abuse that they are not designed to handle. If you plan to autocross, drag or even short course-road race the car then a 5-speed is the way to go from the beginning. If you run the car as I do then you can go to events at places like Watkins Glen (HPDE) or Pocono--long courses and the tranny will be just fine. BTW, on these 2 tracks I'm in 3rd gear most of the time except on the long straights in 4th. I find that the major disadvantage to the SS is that one has to find the correct throttle position in order to use vtec - this versus a 5 pseed which is indeed more responsive. Finally, keep in mind that this is a computer controlled/drive by wire transmission based on 2 of the most successful paddle shift units out there.

Happy Luding

 

To add to jc836's comments:

The replacement SS auto I got had 58,000 miles on it before I replaced it with a manual transmission.

I had changed the ATF religiously and had used (primarily) synthetic ATFs (Mobil 1 and AMSOIL mostly).

There was no sign of any transmission problems with the replacement unit in my 98 (once the actual problem was determined). [Granted, it had an experimental part number on it {noticed that what I took it out.}]

I was also able to swap out my SS tranny in about 12 hours with a friend of mine.

If you are looking at purchasing an automatic Prelude (5G), then you need to get the car's warranty record. If the tranny was replaced under warranty any time in the last 18 months... you're probably OK if you do not intend to boost.

Also, you want to look for modifications on the car. If the previous owner moded the car for any significant HP gain... then it's safe to bet that you want to look for another car.

Next, if the tranny fluid was not replaced every 30,000 miles... than look for another car...

Oh, and if anyone ever used a "reverse flush" machine on the auto... then look for another car...

Lastly, the spooling up of the T/C can be fixed without damaging the SS Auto... for that, you need to send the T/C out to JMO in California. They can rework the T/C and make it a little more efficent without causing transmission issues.

Gerhard


Modified by gerhard at 1:01 PM 5/15/2004

 

i have a 98 auto and it was doing fine until it got to 78k, the transmission started to have problems, the car run but when i get to around 3000rpm, the engine just go crazy, its like i have it in park and rev. the car to redline. And when i put it in reverse the car wouldn't even move, i have to slam on the gas for it to move a little. It took me forever to get to the dealership for them to look at it, but luckily i had the warranty so they replace the transmission free, hehehe . I don't know if its due to too much racing or because i left the sun roof down when it rain one time. ooppsss. now my rebuilt transmission is doing pretty good and i don't race much anymore, but i was wondering how much it would cost to swap the transmission with the manual one? and would it cause any other problems to the engine? and does anyone know where i can get some jdm lip kit that are cheap?
beside all that problem the prelude is pretty good, even though i knew i should have convince my parent to buy me the rsx type s.

 

hey dude, where did you get those parts from?

Thanks.

 

Thanks guys, just to let you know that this is strictly my car to get around and not for racing. I got a b16 hatch for that duty.

Even for a grocery getter I've always love the way preludes feel. I use to have a 92' until I hit a tree, for real. I just love how it hugs the road while still being so smooth from the torquey motor to the heavy chassis.

So if I would just bought an auto even if it's a little bit bad would it be driveable for a grandma, I mean there's asking $6000 and you know ever car can be lower by 500 so that's like atleast $5500.

What do you guys think, will it be tolerable for......let's say 6months. Thanks guys

 

bottom line the prelude auto tranny sucks and is not reliable...and the auto tranny makes the 5th gen "civic slow."

 

things to look for:

-rough shifting
-abrupt shifts
-delayed shifts (ie noticeable lapse of time between gears)
-hard to get into first
-hard to get into reverse/won't go in at all (this is one of the more common problems with the lude trannies)

basically anything that indicates a problem with a regular auto tranny applies to the 5th gen lude auto trannies, so you can stay away from any potential problems, however the problem is ultimately that the design is flawed. sure it's not a "bad" design, it's just not especially good or durable.

 

It should be fine, just do your trans fluids change like maybe every 8-12 months and that is it.

No need to worry IF you are driving it like a gramma.

Now, you may get away with the emissions warranty on that 97 you are talking about.

Ask your local dealership for the warranty and how it goes into effect, you may be in luck.

If not, a friend is selling his auto trans with only 13k miles for a very reasonable price.

I'll let you know if you are interested.

GL&gt;