wanna' bet on that.

 

Do not believe I was responding to you .... btw you make some rather odd comments ...

 

Joe,
Good grief what a mess! Do you have any more info on this situation, what year 15 or 16, how many miles, what was the situation when it blew, just driving along, hard acceleration?
Just curious.
Thanks

 

If GM can't get the 8 speed right, the 10 will be a nightmare.

 

Roadbike56,

It's a 2015 Z06 with 7,700 miles. 100% stock and not abused. The car had never been on a track before and he was on his third lap cruising around Hallett Motor Speedway, cruising along easy, learning the track. He was not running the car hard, not even moderately hard. About how you would drive on the street on a nice curvy public highway.

He had had the flex plate replaced earlier, but had had no symptoms of a bad transmission until it puked it's guts.

 

4k miles on my A8. Shifting well so far.

 

I wonder what the true reliability of the A8 is. So many posts both ggood and bad make it hard to sort out.

I have a 14 A6 that has been really excellent thru 25k miles, but would not have that same level of confidence in the A8, it almost feels like a crap shoot as to whether you get a good one or one with issues down the road.

 

Looks like someone was punched in the mouth and lost his chiclets.

 

This is exactly the primary complaint with the A8. Are you saying that low speed clunkiness is normal? Is that why we don't see more complaints? Because most A8 owners think this is normal behavior?

 

Back to the OP, just a suggestion: Rent a C7 A8 for a day. National Car Rental has them, and I assume most others do too. If you like the feel of the A8 (like I did) then I would order it. If you don't then change your order. Personally, at low speed I find mine very smooth, and at high speed pretty wild.

[Last time I rented a car, National had a Black C7 with Kalahari interior WOW, what a combination--too bad my company frowns on trying to expense exotic rentals.]

 

I guess that that means that all A6 and A8 owners that don't have the low speed clunkiness, should return their car to the dealer and demand that they be given a car that clunks because that's an automatic transmission's normal behavior.

man, the excuses some people come up with....to justify their purchase.

 

My A8 (March 2016 build Z06) is not clunky at all. I drive it often under a variety of conditions both in full auto and paddle shift mode and the shifts have all been fine.

 

I believe that GM designed the current A8 on their own, but Ford designed the new A10 for RWD applications and GM designed the new A10 for FWD/AWD applications.

If you're buying a GM truck, large SUV, Caddy RWD, Camaro, etc, better hope that Ford got it right.

 

Unless it was your car and you know exactly what happened hard to say exactly what happened there. But as you well know anything can fail, since the car was taken apart who knows what happened.

But OK, thats one, more 2014 C7 engines failed than that and people are still buying C7s

 

To answer the OP's original question, no you will not regret it. My A8 Stingray is a rocketship, and I've owned 15 Corvettes (2 of which were autos and didn't last long). Drive a new one and you'll understand.

 

I dont know whats 'normal' to other people, I have driven at least seven 2015+ A8s and they are all the same to me. My '16 truck A6 clunks and bangs when I slow down pulling up to my driveway thats on top of a large hill, just like my '14 C7 A6 did. First time the C7 did it I thought it broke something - then I got used to it.

The A8 has never banged that loud, but the 3-1 downshift can jerk the car a bit, just putting around it can upshift and downshift pretty harsh at times but nothing I would bring the car in under warranty for.

Whats normal and acceptable/unacceptable to others I dont know, either all the A8s I have driven were 'bad' or thats just the way they are. Either way its GMs problem for 5 years and 60K miles if it fails, and if they dont fix it right I'll trade it in. Not like there are no other cars to buy out there..

 

Not some info I picked off the web. The owner is a good friend of mine(for over 10 years) and he showed me the photo while we were having lunch one day. I asked him the details, and I believe he has no reason to lie to me.

The photo was taken by the dealer's tech that dropped the pan.

 

I now have 850 miles on my base 2016 coupe with a build date of 6/16 and knock on wood my A-8 is working great. I had to go with an automatic because if the wife puts her car in for service then she has to either drive my dodge truck or my c-7. I think the c-7 wins hands down. My wife still works while I am retired.

 

Not saying anyone is lying, but there is usually a different side to every story. I never claimed the A8 (or A6) was the best at anything, but I think it gets a pretty bad rap on this forum for whatever reason. They are not silky smooth CVT transmissions, nor are they race bred DCTs. I dont know what people expect from a plain old torque converter auto trans thats tries to do everything.

There are 40 thousand of them out there in Corvettes alone, plus who knows how many in trucks. Since most 2016 full size trucks come with the A8 I imagine quite a few trucks are out there. And yes, people on the truck forums have the same complaints about the A8. Still very few compared to the number out there.

 

I wonder if the major problem with these is in the learning/adapt algorithms which are either learning incorrect behavior or otherwise not reacting as they should. The first adaptive transmission I owned was an Allison 1000 in a 2001 GMC diesel pickup and I never had an issue with it but I recall early on some people reported harsh or odd shifts and in several cases it seems it came from husband and wife drivers who had very different habits causing issues. The Allison 1000 in my 2006 GMC did have one repeated harsh shift situation from third to fourth under light acceleration with the AC on but after it was put back into fast learn mode the issue disappeared and has never come back.

My daughter and I just came back from a 45 mile drive since this was the first time in months that it was nice enough to take the top off. I mostly shifted manually (avoiding any V4 AFM operation) but did let it shift automatically when going through a couple of towns and on a couple of fast merges onto the interstate. There weren't any harsh shifts under light, moderate, or heavy acceleration in automatic mode. Smooth shifting with these clutch to clutch type automatics have been perfected years ago but maybe the software folks are, to quote the British, "too clever by half". Hopefully the engineering team gets a handle on this soon and it has probably been complicated by the real hardware issues that were identified in earlier production.