Recently I was really bummed to find out I had a bad final drive bearing in my transmission. It's an automatic and to replace the shop has to rebuild the transmission and it'll cost about $2600 to fix, assuming none of the gears in it are trashed. It's an 05 LX 4 door with side airbags with only 97000 miles. It's in excellent condition otherwise and has been meticulously maintained. It still runs and drives great but has growling / humming noise when it goes over 30 mph. I just bought new tires for it a little over a month ago.
My dilemma is that I don't really want to dump so much into it but my wife still likes it but even she's not sure we should keep it. I've done a lot of reading about these transmissions and it seems there's a lot of issues with it but supposedly it was improved in 2004. I'm not fully convinced this car is going to last another 97K miles or even half that. The shop I would use is a highly rated shop and talking to them they know this transmission very well.
Should I fix it or sell it?

 

you don't have to rebuild the trans you can swap it out for a used one but that doesn't mean it won't happen again down the road so its up to you. my 04 dx automatic has close to 200,000 miles on it with no problems knock on wood but i replace my transmission fluid with every other oil change.if i was you i would shop around for a used trans and a shop to do the job.

 

I've been looking for used ones but so far I've only found a couple of manuals. I'm just leery about not being able to know if one is any good without having driven the car it came out of.

 

yeah thats the problem with buying used thats why you need a low mileage one. they actually use to sell a full racing rebuild kit for the automatic transmission that made it virtually indestructible.

 

Unfortunately I haven't found any low mileage ones. I'm thinking now to pull it out and replace the bearings myself. I've done some reading and it may not be too terribly hard.
I have some transmission experience but not FWD.

 

i say go for it especially if you have prior experience with removing transmissions which also means you have the tools to do so. its not difficult its just tedious.