This is my first post on the forum. Greetings, forum.

I own a 2001 Civic, purchased about 18 months ago at 76k miles. At 101k miles, my automatic transmission failed. A cursory search online showed me that this is a common problem with early 2000's Civics, with 2001s being the most problematic (note to self: research a car before buying).

I know almost nothing about automobiles. From what I could gather from online videos, automatic transmissions fail when moving parts wear out. I watched a video where a guy dismantled an automatic transmission and explained how they work.. Specifically, this one --- Davidsfarm 1042 ydlRegFEaIk SQ How automatic car transmissions work , part 1 - YouTube

Somewhere in that video or its subsequent counterpart, I believe he mentions that there are basically only two moving parts that can wear out on automatic transmissions. Is this true?

I had the transmission rebuilt (about 8 weeks ago), as well as the timing belt replaced, as well as two other belts. I was driving my car earlier tonight (yesterday), and while on an incline, I felt that the car was not accelerating accordingly to the engine revving. When the transmissions go out on these Civics, people seem to always state that the engine revs but the car will not move. This is what I experienced when mine failed. I was able to drive about 1.5 miles at low speed before my car wouldn't move at all. It may be worth noting that from the time I purchased the car up until the tranny rebuild, the check engine light would intermittently go on and off, and since the rebuild it has not come back on once.

So, I basically have two questions. One, is it possible for a rebuilt transmission to start acting up a couple thousand miles in? I ask this because if I am to believe the video I linked, it doesn't seem that there is usually "gradual" wear of parts but rather pretty rapid wear once a threshold is reached. Two, is it reasonable for my engine to rev up to 3500 rpm while uphill, to only VERY gradually see a progression from 20mph into the 25mph range? It pretty much jumps from 1000 rmp to 3500-ish within a second of depressing the accelerator, and I don't feel like I'm accelerating much. It just sounds and feels like my engine is overworking. I believe I pushed the rpm's up close to 5000 at one point (for maybe 5 seconds at a time). It seems to me that doing this should pretty quickly be getting you up into the 70 or 80 mph range, and that definitely did not happen, but I was on an incline. (As stated, I feel uneasy on an incline. Once I get the car going 40 mph on a relatively flat road the rpm's stay pretty low.)

I honestly usually keep music on in my car and noticed this first when I happened to not have music going. It could be that I am being paranoid about engine revving because of my experience with the failure.

With all of this said, I do plan on calling the shop (local shop, one location) that serviced my car tomorrow, and they may just tell me to bring it to them to address concerns. So that may clear everything up pretty quickly, in terms of whether or not there is a problem. But I did want to ask the question of a broader community to see what kind of general feedback I got, so that's why I'm posting this here.

If my mechanics tell me there is no problem but it still feels like there may be one, how should I approach the situation? There is a year warranty on the rebuild and I figure that if there is a problem manifesting this early, it will almost certainly not take another 10 months to become fully apparent. But I know driving around with a malfunctioning transmission can cause a myriad of other problems, and I payed a lot of money to have this work done, so I don't want to mess around.


Thanks to any replies! Questions welcomed.

 

First and foremost, if it was rebuilt 8 weeks ago and already stopped working, it needs to go straight back to the shop. If it was rebuilt properly, it should be good to go for another hundred thousand miles.

 

As an update to this. I did take this back to the shop (the following day). They drove it and told me it wasn't driving unusually. I drove it all day yesterday, and it WAS driving without any problems. However, with it driving normally, I was able to determine with absolute certainty that it was, in fact, not functioning properly the previous night. I had a couple people say that it's possible I had some bad gasoline in the tank.

If that was not the issue, I have one other question. Someone suggested that if the transmission is going to fail again prematurely, that there could be something else somewhere within the workings of the car that could be causing the transmission to wear out too quickly. That is, it perhaps is not the transmission itself that is faulty, but that it will suffer the consequences of some other fault.

Anybody know anything about the possibility of this happening?