Well we went to pick the car up yesterday at the dealership and I grilled the cust. service guy. I made him explain to me the details of exactly what they did and of course because he's just the liason for the customers, he didn't know a lot. He said that they have two main tranny guys in their shop and he said one has already looked at it. He said if I wanted he'd have the second one look at it this morning for an additional opinion and then would call me. Guy called me this morning and I actually got to speak to a tech this time. I asked him every question that I could think of and he either answered it or said he wouldn't know until he tore into the transmission.
One thing did occur to me last night however. As I was researching, I saw that the TPS was thown out as a possible cause, but no one ever confirmed this solved their problem. Well, I randomly remembered that my wife said she was coasting down a long gradual hill and she put the shifter into Neutral (she thought that'd save gas) as she coasted. Well the engine stalled sometime while she was in Neutral. I didn't really think anything of it because it never happened to me and wasn't anything I could duplicate or pinpoint to even try and fix. So I brushed it off thinking I wouldn't worry about it until it became an issue. I also remembered that sometime when I would coast down a hill or whatever, I noticed the RPM's would oscillate up and down, back and forth. Again, it was kind of random and only seemed to happen while coasting so I didn't freak out about it.
Well a while back my Jeep was having issues with oscillating RPM's and stalling. This was a little different because it would happen all the time at any speed. Never threw on a check engine light. Anyway, $30 TPS sensor ended up being the fix. So all this hit me and I told the dealership tech about it and he said in his 15 years, he'd never seen a bad TPS NOT throw a code, but he said for how cheap the sensors are, it couldn't hurt to throw a new one in and see what happens. Dealer wanted $165 to swap in a new TPS which just makes me roll on the ground laughing. So I'm going to pick the car up from the dealer today and swap the sensor myself and see what happens. With ALL the symptoms I have, I'm somewhat doubtful this will work, but I think it's worth checking.
I also decided that trying to make a decision on the trans when my trans shop says one thing and the dealer says something entirely different is only going to give me a stroke. So I decided after I try and fail the TPS test, I'll take it to two or three other local trans shops and have them do diagnostics on it. If they all or the majority say the trans is at fault, then I'll have the best one (best reviewed) go ahead and try to repair. IF the trans repair fixes the prob, then I might have to go after the shop who rebuilt it because it's still very much within warranty and he absolutely refuses to entertain the notion that something could be conceivable wrong with the transmission. So we'll see what happens.
