Holden Cruze Gearbox & Transmission Problems

It’s a common problem with that model Cruze. It will need a new transmission. I would guess that Holden’s apparent reluctance to help is because the car is so old.

Holden has in the past replaced faulty transmissions without cost to the owner, but I would guess they won’t offer to replace yours free of charge, as your car is seven years old. But until it is assessed you can only speculate that the transmission is at fault.

You could try for a goodwill payment from Holden, but I doubt that you would have any success. Your car is 10 years old, it’s done 200,000 km, and you bought it second hand.

The 1.8-litre manual is a solid, generally reliable car compared to the automatic, which is know to be troublesome. Obviously, it doesn't have a turbo, which can also be troublesome.

The six-speed automatic transmission in the Cruze built between 2011 and 2013 was, indeed, a bit suspect in some cases. Unfortunately, that puts the vehicle in question right in the middle of things. Holden instigated a fix which was applied when a car with gearbox dramas was brought in for repairs. Sometimes individual parts of the transmission could be replaced, at other times the transmission was replaced as a whole unit.

Any Cruze with a gearbox that flares during shifts, shudders, refuses to select a particular gear (including reverse) or loss of drive was covered by this special service directive. When fixed, Holden was extending the warranty of the transmission to five years or 150,000km. That won’t help you now, but it would pay to check whether the car you’re looking at has, in fact, had this work carried out. A car with these repairs carried out would be a better choice than one that hasn’t.

Holden is at least showing a desire to fix your car, and getting the engineers to look at it would be worthwhile, but it must getting to the point that the car should be called a ‘lemon’ even though we don’t have such laws in this country. If this had happened in the US there is little doubt that the car would have been replaced or you would have had your money refunded. I would be looking to come to an agreement with Holden to get out of the car.

It sounds like it could have the dreaded Cruze auto transmission problem. Take it to a Holden dealer, or an automatic transmission mechanic and have them check it.

The car is still under warranty, so you should expect that the repairs would be covered. It’s no unreasonable that they want the car for a full day; you have to give them every chance to find the cause. As they claim they couldn’t find the problem when driving the car, it would be a good idea if you were to test-drive it with them to demonstrate the problem you are concerned about. That way there is no doubt in your mind or theirs about what it is you feel needs to be fixed. The fact that the transmission oil is very black suggests there is something wrong internally. Have the diagnostic check done, and then work out who pays for what and what needs to be done to get your car running again properly.

If it is the well-known transmission issue then you could have a claim against Holden to repair or replace it, but if it isn’t you have no claim. You need to establish what the problem is, and you can then contact Holden, but until you actually know what the problem is you are in limbo.

As the vast majority of Holden Cruzes sold were automatics, finding out information on the manual version is not so easy. But I have heard of a few cases of this model suffering transmission faults where the gearbox becomes jammed in gear (and won’t come out) or jammed in neutral (and won’t select a gear).

If that’s the case, then it could be a case of a broken or faulty gear-selector cable or mechanism and may not mean the entire gearbox is toast. Either way, I’d expect more than 120,000km of service in a modern car before the gearbox died. But you haven’t told me the symptoms, so it’s hard to know what’s going on. Is the clutch okay? Is it a case of the driveshaft (rather than the gearbox itself) having failed?

As for replacing the gearbox with a brand-new one, I think that finding a good used unit from a wrecking yard would be a much more wallet-friendly exercise. The exception would be if the problem affected all manual Cruzes, at which point, a second-hand replacement would only be postponing the inevitable for a second time. But since the value of the car wouldn’t be more than the cost of a brand-new transmission, the equation comes down to whether you like the car enough to keep it. Is the rest of the car in good condition? If not, you might be better cutting your losses and finding something newer and with plenty of life left in it.