Pesky Gearbox

[sgt.colon]

Hello all,

Hopefully someone can help. We are having problems with our 02, 1.0 litre Yaris. For a couple of months the car has been making a whining noise. Normally worse the fast it got. It was due for a service and MOT. So I took it to our local garage for this and told them about the whining noise. We got the car back all serviced and MOT'd and they said they could not find anything wrong with it. A week has gone by and my wife was out in the car and said it was making a noise like something was dragging on the floor. She pulled over and I went down to have a look. The car started fine with no noise, so I ask her to just turn the car round. She set off and it sounded like a bag of bolts rattling around. She started to turn and the car kind of juddered and then cut out. It was stuck in the middle of the road and on a slight incline and we could not get the car to move at all. It was as if it was stuck in gear. The AA man came out and we got the car home on the back of a flatbed truck. After it had been dragged about, getting the car on to the back of the truck, it had no problem rolling backwards off the truck. We started it up and it started fine, popped it into gear and it tried to move forward. It moaned a little and then cut out. The car was once again stuck in gear. We rocked the car back and forth and managed to get it out of gear. With the engine turned off we can now not get it in to any gear. The AA man said he thought it was either the gearbox or differential that had gone. The car has done 45k miles. Is it either of those 2 things the AA man said? and if so what sort of repair cost are we looking at?

Any help much appreciated.

[Madasafish]

". A week has gone by and my wife was out in the car and said it was making a noise like something was dragging on the floor. "

Sounds like:

a broken gear tooth.

a bearing collpase.

A tooth broken off the differential.

I assume the first thing the garge did was check the oil? They did? First thing you need to do before anyone does anything is to get someone independent of the garage to check the oil..

Why? Gearboxes are very tough. Your sounds and story are consistent with no oil which means lack of maintenance..

Of course it may be something lese.

Any sign of oil leaks?

Diagnosis by distance is virtually impossible. It's a take it out and open it up job.

That is £££s.. And a replacement gearbox almost certainly.

[sgt.colon]

Thanks for the reply Madasafish.

Oil is fine. I'd checked it a couple of weeks before it went in and I went and checked it last night. Full on both occasions.

[Chris81]

He means the gearbox oil, not the engine oil.

[sgt.colon]

Lol! Oh right, yeah I checked that and that was all ok to.