School me on CVT's...Good, bad and ugly

I will say that on the hills and in the mountains the CVT does keep the engine RPM annoyingly high ...

 

It wasn't exactly Pikes Peak, but our rental Rav4 did just fine going up Big Thompson canyon. Pikes Peak is a particularly harsh test that will strain just about any typically underpowered rental car drivetrain.

 

CVTs come in many flavors. I don't think any of the Toyota CVTs sold in the US are of the belt type that causes so much trouble in the Nissans. The "CVT" sold in the Prius is actually a Power Split Device (https://eahart.com/prius/psd/) that has no clutches or variable gearing at all. Two electric motors and the engine are constantly engaged. It's pretty clever and mechanically simple, and part of why Prius's last forever. Random fact: it was developed by TRW in the late 60s.

Toyota CVTs:
https://toyota-club.net/files/faq/21-12-01_faq_hybrid_tr_en.htm

 

Honestly I think part of the problem at least with our experience with the Subaru was the sales guy said the transmission never needs service and like a schmuck I believed he knew what he was talking about. Ours started surging at speed and what little I was able to learn said it was going to be a very expensive repair on a 10 year old car. We elected to trade and get a new one.

But the new one drove both of us nuts with the engine shutting off at stop lights, the air conditioning not working if we were accelerating, the constant nags from the computer to keep my eyes on the road (even when I was looking at the road), the unlock sensors that wouldn't work half the time in the rain and I can't remember all what else. She'd had 3 Subarus all bought brand new, but won't be buying another.

Sorry for the thread jack, but the point is we had one with a CVT that failed after 110k and didn't drive the 2nd one more than a few months.

 

The CVT in my parents' Honda HRV took a crap after 15000 rpm. And you can forget about hauling any kind of trailer with these pieces of shit.

 

To be fair, 15000 RPM will stress quite a few passenger vehicles...

 

Yeah I knew they did it a bit different than other brands and it's the only CVT I've ever really driven. I was nervous about it but I drove it on a road trip before I bought it to see if I hated it. Honestly I barely notice the drivetrain at all in the thing and its pretty f'ing awesome. I will definitely stay with their hybrids for my future appliance car needs.

 

Anecdotes about reliability are probably not overly useful, so you really need to rent the car you're considering to see what its like to live with. If you live in an area with hills and long grades, going for miles with the engine droning at 3,500 rpm might wear on you as it did me on a recent rental. My gut says CVT's are less costly to produce than an 6-10 speed auto, so it's simply a cost cutting measure reframed as maximizing efficiency (mpg, performance, etc).

 

Everything I’ve read on them says if they’re going to fail, it’s in the 120K-150K range, just like a Nissan. They usually don’t make it past that. BUT, like anything, usage and luck have to be considered factors. I really like their vehicles, except for that aspect.

 

I’ll find out pretty quick then as I do ~60k a year on my car and I’m at almost 120k now. But I also actually service my car and it lives on the highway mostly so maybe that helps?

 

Sorry I meant 15000 kms lol

 

My girl had a Nissan Rogue. CVT failed at 60k and was $6k to fix. I bought a junkyard trans but a week later someone saved me a lot of time by totaling it while it was parked in the road.

No way I was going through that again so I got her a Honda CRV, because Hondas are reliable right? Transmission failed at 60k, and it cost $6k to fix. I'll never buy another CVT.

The worst part is that unless you're paying attention, you won't know it's failing. The CRV had exactly 60,200 miles on it. When I drove it for the first time in a long time, I noticed it was acting up. My girl never noticed or it would have been under warranty. Honda was zero help.

Worth noting that we live in coastal San Diego and she thinks that acceleration rate should always be the same whether she's on a flat road or a 30% grade.

 

Pikes Peak notes: engine good, CVT bad, the end

 

I have over 65k on the CVT (they call it IVT) in my commuter Kia Forte and it hasn't had any issues yet. It did take some getting used to, but I was coming from a 4Runner so it was a huge change all around.

Kia has 100k mile warranty on all drivetrain parts so I'm not overly worried at this point, since I've had no problems from it.

 

A few positive notes for CVT .... my 2012 CR-Z has right at 210,000 miles and no issues at all.
My son has 260k+ on his Civic and trouble free. But we do change the fluid at 30k like clockwork and filter every other fluid change.
My sister has a Corolla with 200k miles on it and no problems there either.

Wife Inc had a Nissan Rogue Sport for maybe a year. Within 8,000 miles it's CVT started having the "Nissan CVT " issues. After 2nd trip to the dealership about it, she come home with a Frontier crew cab and some cash back.

 

Well there’s a class action lawsuit against Nissan for these junk transmissions working its way through the system, I can only hope that it gets me a new transmission before mine totally craps out…Nissan already extended the warranty by 2 years or 24k miles but it didn’t help me because I was over the mileage. When was the last time that you heard of a manufacturer freely extending a warranty like that?

 

My wife has a 2016 Subaru Outback with 90K miles. She doesn't even think about the trans being a CVT since it fakes the shifts pretty well. It is transparent to her and how she drives. I don't care for it very much as it just seems a little "sloppy" to me. She will be getting another and I would prefer to never have one in my vehicle.

 

IMO they aren't even that bad, driving wise, anymore. My mother's HR-V is so good it took me 3-4 drives to even notice.

For comparison, when I drove her old 'CBT' equipped BMW Mini for the first time it actually made me angry. The early CVTs were junk even before they turned to actual junk.

 

Fake shifting defeats the entire supposed benefits of a CVT.

 

I have had 2 rentals that were CVT. The first was a Nissan Sentra around 2010. From the time I picked it up something just seemed strange about the way it drove. Once I realized that it all made sense and it was actually fun to drive. Getting on the highway you could just nail the gas, the RPMs would go up and stay there, and it would accelerate way faster that it had any business to. It also got great fuel mileage. The other was a civic around 2014 or so. It drove me nuts because it was always "shifting." I counted 9 fake shifts getting on the highway once. The whole time I had the car it pissed me off that it could have been nice and smooth and efficient but they programmed all of those fake shifts to make it seem like an automatic.