Gear Box/clutch Problem Thingy

[jott]

The number for Toyota Customer Relations is 01737 367 600 - as provided to me by the nice kind man at Shields Toyota Glasgow who tried to tell me that my clutch failing after 3000 miles was just one of those things and was not the symptom of a more serious problem with the gearbox

My 3rd clutch is a marginal improvement on the last one but I still don't feel entirely satisfied with it. I am taking my car into a local garage around the corner from my work and I am going to ask them to inspect the whole gearbox and see if they can see anything which has been missed by the guys at Mr. T.

HI GAYLE, Thank you for your comments, they are most helpful. I will ring the number in the next few days and let you know what happens. Are there any other gearbox/clutch symptons you are/have experienced. Thank you

[TK999]

We've recently had a lot of the symptoms described in this post on our 7 year old Aygo - very difficult to engage 1st or 2nd gear, horrible noise when putting the car into reverse, etc.

The car's still on its original clutch after 45,000 miles, so we're expecting to have to replace it soon. However, we just got it back from its annual service, where they changed the gearbox oil and lubricated the gear-change mechanism and initial impressions are that the gear-change is massively improved.

We'll monitor it closely, but hopefully we've avoided a clutch replacement for a little while longer.

Quotes we've had for a new clutch range from £288 (local clutch specialist), to £299 (Mr Clutch), to £438 (our local garage that does the servicing). All prices are including VAT, etc. Seems like a massive variation, so need to understand if it's really like-for-like. Not sure I want some dodgy non-original part fitted that may cause problems in future (there was a similar variation in price when we had the water pump replaced a couple of years ago - very pleased we didn't go to the cheapest place then as we've subsequently found they use unbranded parts that don't actually address the underlying known fault).

All in all, we think the Aygo is a great little car, which is fun to drive and still cheap to run due to very low insurance, £20 road tax and good mpg. Moving away from having the car serviced at a Toyata dealership was worthwhile on our part, as we've had some very bad experiences with both Toyota Jemca and Currie Motors.

[gbsh]

You might find this post of interest.

http://www.c1oc.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6956

Regrads

Gary

[TK999]

Further to my post above, whilst changing the gearbox oil and lubricating the gearchange mechanism had improved things a lot, it still wasn't quite right. We decided to take the plunge and have a new clutch fitted (we had reservations about that as posts in other forums pointed to the gearchange mechanism itself as being the culprit).

The clutch was changed at Kingston Bridge clutches, who did the job in under 2 hours (they've changed a lot of them over the years) and for less than £300. They showed me the old clutch and whilst the clutch plates themselves were worn down virtually to the rivets, we were shocked to see that two of the mounting points on the clutch casing had sheered off completely. I'm amazed the clutch worked at all, and relieved that we had it changed before the remaining mounting points failed and goodness knows what sort of internal damage could have been done.

The new clutch is the upgraded 19cm version, and works much better than the original ever did.

No clutch slippage, no nasty crunches, and smooth gearchanges.