Scotty Kilmer is so annoying: best auto transmissions?

[kevm14]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYnYkx8Rwp0

He answered a viewer question of "who makes the best transmissions?"

His answer was predictable.

I'm going to attempt to provide a better answer.

I would agree with his Aisin answer, but add ZF and GM. And since GM sold Allison in 2007, I will also add Allison. In some very limited applications, Ford has a couple of good transmissions but it's really not worth mentioning because the dataset is so small.

In terms of time, I don't think there is any doubt that GM has been making good transmissions the longest. Allison is close but GM still beat them by 10 years (1939). That's a little odd to say because GM owned Allison from ~49 to 07. So from a legacy standpoint, I think GM is a pretty easy answer. World's first fully automatic 4-speed in 1939. That is impressive.

A harder answer would be to narrow it to the past 20 years. GM has been behind in some of the latest race to number of speeds (helped by the joint venture with Ford on the 10 speed), as well as shift speed. ZF was ahead there and in fact GM did not have an 8-speed auto ready for the CTS V-sport in 2014 so they went with Aisin. I don't know that Aisin is really any better than GM in terms of shift speed kind of stuff. So today I'd probably have to give it to ZF with maybe GM and Aisin taking a 2nd place tie? And for trucks, Allison but I am not really sure they even have much in the way of competition in the heavier segments.

I should probably try to list some others that explicitly do not make the list:
- Honda
- Nissan (better than Honda but not as good as Aisin)
- To the extent that Mazda even made their own, they probably weren't that great
- Do I even need to list Chrysler? The last transmissions they made that were any good only had 3 speeds.
- Ford for the most part (like I said, a handful are good)

Mercedes probably makes decent transmissions but I am not really familiar with them (they are the closest analogy to a German GM in terms of history, likelihood of outsourcing major powertrain components, major R&D efforts, etc.)

[bill25]

Mazda uses JATCO, not great...

[Adam]

I think the title of this thread should have stopped before ':'

[kevm14]

I have tried to like him. It's not actually his style that is annoying - I am accommodating for different personalities. It's that he shows the same 240k mile 90s Celica in practically every video and makes some point vaguely related to it. Or his wife's Lexus ES. He just seems....stuck in the 90s when it comes to car information. I guess it would be like me doing the same with my Caprice or something, but the difference is, I don't have a major YouTube channel...

[kevm14]

I mean if his point is that 90s Japanese cars are the high water mark for industry reliability*, then no disagreement from me. I don't know that the same point needs to be made over and over again, though.

* I would say that I am sticking to Toyota, Honda and Nissan here (and I guess in that order). Mitsubishi and Subaru, for example, are second tier. I would probably throw Mazda in that second tier, as well.

[Adam]

Yep. He should start adding"get off my lawn" to his rants.