npretnar
New member
Hi all, new to the forum. I'm more of a Mercedes diesel guy myself, but my girlfriend has a 2007 Jetta TDI that I drive frequently. I own an an 83 300CD on which I do most of the maintenance work myself.
Anyway, the issue ...
The 07 Jetta TDI has 66K on it most of which has been highway driving. The last couple thousand miles the automatic transmission has been really herky-jerky in shifting gears especially 3 to 4, 4 to 5 and 5 to 6. The car shakes and vibrates extremely for about a five second period revved above 3000 RPM, and then when you back off the throttle a little, it tries to upshift but hesitates. In fact, it might actually be upshifting for a brief second and subsequently downshifting, for example, from 3 to 4 and then quickly back down to 3 and back and forth, not holding that fourth gear until you back off the throttle really a lot and then floor it real quick to sort of push it through the gear shift.
She thinks it's a transmission issue, though the fluid was just recently changed at the dealer and the car has so few miles that I'm inclined to think otherwise. The other morning I took the car out for a spin (temperature below 20F, so I let it warm up for about ten minutes), just to examine the issue a bit more closely. I particularly noticed that the hesitation and vibration are rather violent when the vehicle is cold. After warm up, say ten miles of driving or so, the problem goes away. This is consistent, though she has said that every once in a while, while attempting to accelerate at highway speeds with the car already warm, she has noticed minor hesitancy and vibration but nothing to the extent as when it is cold.
Disinclined to simply take the vehicle to the dealer and throw money at it, I thought about potential problems which could be causing something like this to occur and I asked her if she had has fuel filters ever changed? She didn't think so and recent records do not indicate that such has ever happened. Also not, she has never used cetane additives of any sort nor biodiesel. Nonetheless, a clogged fuel filter could conceivably cause such a loss of power issue as the problem is quite similar to what once happened on my 300CD when i had an extremely plugged pre filter and discovered a layer of algae in the fuel tank.
My question, does anyone here know of any transmission or shifting problems on the 2007 Jetta TDI? If so, could you please inform me.
Thanks,
Nick
Anyway, the issue ...
The 07 Jetta TDI has 66K on it most of which has been highway driving. The last couple thousand miles the automatic transmission has been really herky-jerky in shifting gears especially 3 to 4, 4 to 5 and 5 to 6. The car shakes and vibrates extremely for about a five second period revved above 3000 RPM, and then when you back off the throttle a little, it tries to upshift but hesitates. In fact, it might actually be upshifting for a brief second and subsequently downshifting, for example, from 3 to 4 and then quickly back down to 3 and back and forth, not holding that fourth gear until you back off the throttle really a lot and then floor it real quick to sort of push it through the gear shift.
She thinks it's a transmission issue, though the fluid was just recently changed at the dealer and the car has so few miles that I'm inclined to think otherwise. The other morning I took the car out for a spin (temperature below 20F, so I let it warm up for about ten minutes), just to examine the issue a bit more closely. I particularly noticed that the hesitation and vibration are rather violent when the vehicle is cold. After warm up, say ten miles of driving or so, the problem goes away. This is consistent, though she has said that every once in a while, while attempting to accelerate at highway speeds with the car already warm, she has noticed minor hesitancy and vibration but nothing to the extent as when it is cold.
Disinclined to simply take the vehicle to the dealer and throw money at it, I thought about potential problems which could be causing something like this to occur and I asked her if she had has fuel filters ever changed? She didn't think so and recent records do not indicate that such has ever happened. Also not, she has never used cetane additives of any sort nor biodiesel. Nonetheless, a clogged fuel filter could conceivably cause such a loss of power issue as the problem is quite similar to what once happened on my 300CD when i had an extremely plugged pre filter and discovered a layer of algae in the fuel tank.
My question, does anyone here know of any transmission or shifting problems on the 2007 Jetta TDI? If so, could you please inform me.
Thanks,
Nick
