Kizashi Club

Recently our Kizashi has developed a strange issue with the RPM's when the transmission is in Automatic mode.

Cruising down the highway at a sustained speed using the cruise control or not results in the transmission spiking anywhere between 200 to 600 rpm. The jumps in RPM are so violent that sometimes it feels as though the car is being pushed from behind (kind of unnerving at highway speeds).

Here is a video I took with the cruise control set at 100 km/h on a perfectly flat road with no wind.

http://s232.photobucket.com/albums/ee84 ... 1fa6e5.mp4

I showed this video to the service department manager at the Suzuki dealership and he asked me to email it to him so that he could forward it on to Suzuki.

This is all I know so far:

• It only does it in Automatic mode on the transmission.
  It does it with or without the cruise control on, but is more violent with the cruise on.
  It seems to be getting worse each time we drive the car.
  The RPM jumps are higher and more violent the faster you go.

Nice....more electronic gremlins. It's the motor rpm version of the R.F. stereo volume control jump problem. Well, at least you could 'demonstrate' the problem to the dealer before wasting your time.

The Suzuki place we deal with is very good service wise, and I trust that they will fix the problem, but I am just worried the transmission is dying.

ahh...yeah, the CVT's stepper doing wierd things...that would make sense. Let's hope not.

We took it on a long drive last weekend, I kept shifting it back and forth between manual and auto mode to see if it was still doing it, and it was. After about 2 hours of driving, it suddenly quit doing it, we drove for another hour then parked the car overnight. Next day we did another 3 hours of driving and it didn't do it once.

Suzuki called me and they want me to wait until its happening again and then bring it in immediately so they can put their diagnostic computer on it while its happening.

I will post if there are any further updates.

thanks for the updater~
hope they find out what the problem is really soon

Ok, to update this.

My wife drives the car to work, its about a 15 minute drive on the highway. She never reported having the issue again, so we thought it was gone.

I use the car from time to time on longer trips, and we discovered that the issue came back once the CVT was good and hot, like after driving 30 minutes, or if you were speeding a bit.

Long story short, Suzuki was able to capture the event (they put 60 miles on my car to get it to happen, even though I had 5 video recordings of the issue happening) but they had to record it with their data loggers I guess.

Now for the bad news, both the CVT transmission and transmission control module need to be replaced. These are not cheap units, MSRP on the transmission alone is $7300 and with labour and the TCM its going to be a near $10,000 warranty claim. If I add that to what they've already replaced on our car under warranty, we are currently at $12,000 in warranty work. We love this car, but if we have any more huge problems like this, I think we will be selling it.

I do have to say that Suzuki's warranty is excellent though.

ouch man...that really hurts, I don't care who's paying for it. The jury is out for me pesonally on CVT transmissions. I'm not a hot-rod by any stretch, so the "lag" doesn't upset me as it does others, but the unpredictability of what it's going to do when is something I'm working on getting used to. Thank god for the paddle shifters, I use them all the time.

Hopefully the replacement works out so you and the wife can get back to enjoying why you purchased the car.

Ok, transmission and TCM have been replaced... sigh.

Suzuki has been good about replacing stuff on warranty, but I am seriously wondering if we have a lemon here.

So far we have had the following replaced on warranty and we haven't had the car a year.

- Steering Wheel (actually needs to be replaced again due to leather cracking and splitting)
- Subwoofer
- Transmission
- Transmission control module
- Stereo head unit

Basically the only other major component left to change is the engine and it will be pretty well a new car.

Ben, what's the build date of your car?