There’s nothing about Kokomo
June 25th, 2009 • by David Zatz
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There is never anything about the kokomo transmission plants or the casting plant, we build all the automatic transmissions for C,J,D and nothing on this site about the 4 plants in Kokomo Indiana
That is absolutely true, and there are two good reasons. The first is that we simply haven’t gotten there yet. The second is that we don’t have anyone in the Kokomo area to send us pictures, and no factory workers or retired managers have contacted us to tell us about the plants.
So if you’re in or around Kokomo, we’re waiting for you.
I’ll be glad to start this thread off by saying that the women and men at Kokomo are doing a great job and should be applauded. The newest Chrysler designs are proving to be EXTREMELY robust and reliable. I talk to transmission technicians regularly and they tell me they are not seeing 545RFE or 68RFEs needing repairs. I think Chrysler finally got their engineering act together and addressed the issues affecting long term reliability of the previous RE series.
Of course, there are still a lot of people that get enjoyment out of perpetuating negative reputation. A friend of mine has a brother-in-law that works for a local shop who never seems to miss an opportunity to proclaim anything from Chrysler as “junk.” When he made a comment about “all of the new Dodge RAMs with failing transmissions,” I asked him what he was seeing. He said that “the hemis just eat the guts out of those trannies.” When he stated that a he recently rebuilt a transmission out of a 2007 Hemi RAM that “needed everything,” including all new clutches and “bands,” I asked if he replaced both filters on these Mopar trannies. He said they only have one. Of course, that would be true if it were a RH or RE, but 545RFEs have two. Oh, and they don’t have any bands at all! When I told him this the look of amazement on his face told the whole story.
Obviously he’s never seen a 545 or 68RFE.