Thread: Need Help Problems are Back

What year/model/make is your car? It sounds like you have a very common problem and likely have a code P1811 stored in the pcm history which is for max adapt shift. The pcm will monitor how long each shift takes to complete and if it is slipping excessively more than it wants to see and compensate for the code will set, but it will not turn on the check engine light so you wont know unless you scan the car. The hard shifting will go away with a key cycle until the problem is present again. When this code sets at that moment it will dissable adaptive shift pressure and go to max line pressure as a failsafe and cause your hard shifts. Likely since the weather has been bad you havent been driving the car too hard so the trans hasnt been under enough load to cause the excessive slippage and that is why it didnt start shifting hard as the code wasnt setting. There is more information about this on my info page in the link in my sig.

It is a pretty big job to replace the pressure control solenoid as you have to drop the trans down and remove the side cover from the trans to gain access to the valve body and solenoids. Most shops honestly try to avoid just replacing the solenoid as it is not a 100% guaranteed fix and often try to sell a full rebuild.

As long as the trans works fine other than the harsh shifts when it warms up it should be ok for a while. I have had a lot of people tell me they have driven a few years with this problem going on and not got any worse, but I have also had people tell me that a few weeks later the trans died on them so there is no spot-on answer but the majority seems to drive quite a while like these and is more of an annoyance than anything else. The harsh shifting is a failsafe to prevent the trans from burning up.