Fiat Grande Punto Auto Gearbox Woes

[philibusmo]

I realise that this is modern content, but this forum seems to be a fountain of all possible car knowledge.

 

A friend of mine has a 2007 Fiat Grande Punto 1.4 Auto with about 60,000 miles on the clock.

 

Recently it has been having issues selecting gears.

 

When it is put into reverse first thing in the morning it shows 'gear not available' and flashes its transmission light on the dash and it needs to be slotted into neutral for upto 30 seconds, wait for the light to stop flashing and it will then be able to select the gear. Additionally it will often do the same when driving normally in auto mode where it will say 'gear not available' for about 30 seconds before it is able to change gear. It can happen in triptronic mode but no-where near as often.

 

He has been quoted by a 'specialist gearbox centre' £1300 to change the selector head. I have pointed out that he could buy 4 working cars for that money.

As this specialist centre can't even spell vehicle on their invoices they seem like an utter bunch of cretins and we expect the fault is probably not even with the selector head.

 

I expect that this gearbox is made of the same stuff as the Alfa Romeo sillyspeed so I'm not surprised he is having issues but equally I expect that it is something relatively minor as most of the time it will drive without any problems. Apart from the obvious such as checking the gearbox oil and making sure there are no adjustable rods or cables to it that look incorrectly adjusted or borked, is there anything else obvious that might be the cause.

 

I will also have a look through the fiat forum later but oddly it has been blocked on our work computers, and yet autoshite hasn't.

[kinkersaab]

spoooky....

i have just this morning had a customer with a panda spazzyshift semi auto thing describing exactly the same symptoms.

her car has done................5000 miles........

[cort16]

I'd pay to take it into Fiat and get the codes read on the proper diagnostic machine. If it's doing stuff like this I bet there's fault codes showing.

[philibusmo]

It's had it's codes read:

 

P1773 hydraulic circuit pressure

P1772 gearshift lever switches (one of four)

 

He took me for a drive in it to see if I could make any sense of it and it worked flawlessly. He used it in auto and triptronic but apart from being very slow there was no issues what so ever.

Seems to be very intermitant in nature and has no correlation on it being hot or cold. One thing that was odd is that according to his wife, the power steering stopped working entirely at one point and it had to be restarted to get it going again. The same happens with the gears. If one is not available, then the car often needs to be restarted to get the box going again.

When we were driving it, the hydraulic pump did seem to be running a fair amount while we were stationary and selecting gears.

 

Anyone know if the power steering and box hydraulics are linked on these things, and if it could be a blocked filter or similar. My money at the moment is on a dying pump.