Dealer today tells me my Ruby tranny is bad and I'm looking at $1500 in repairs on a 2001 which finally just hit a mere 1000 miles. HELP!!! Any suggestions on possible options, how to push Honda to review it and "maybe" help me out - anything!!

Dealer has a call into the regional service manager. He is also calling the Honda Techline, but I'm not expecting much from them.

FYI - Bike is very sluggish off the line and sputters when under load. No odd noises or grinding sounds. On an incline, it sputters, but will climp on up if I stop and shift it into low. Once it gets moving it's fine and has acceleration. In ESP it will jump into limp mode when you hit 2nd. Reverse no longer has a rev-limiter. Dealer says he checked something on the tranny which should rotate freely and it's not - sorry, I'm not sure what he was referring to - to frustrated to remember.

 

Man, that really bites. There does seem to be the rare Rubi failure out there.

My advice at this point would be to wait and see what the dealer says after talking to Honda. Assuming you did oil changes on time with oil that meets spec that's really low milage to have a major failure.

Maybe Honda will offer to cover parts if you pay labor, or something...

 

Is your warranty out by now? Very sorry to hear that as the Rubicon is generally bulletproof, tranny included. I used to own one and loved it for the transmission.

 

Well, it's been over a month and the Ruby is still at the dealer, but..... Honda stepped to the plate and has offered to cover all parts of a tranny replacement that they said is rare and shouldn't have happened. This is on a 2001, waaaay out of warrenty, so I have to give Honda credit and a big thank you for helping me out on this. As you can tell I am happy with their response - although I have yet to see what the labor costs are going to be. I have heard somewhere around $500 (10 hours) and the dealer was, again, going the extra step to see if Honda would even cover some of that. Not counting on that and should probably just be happy with at least the parts.

 

Well I am a tech and the oil pumps in the 01's were the weak link. Good to hear that Honda is still repairing those they knew that they were bad back then.