Today was the day of a micro-forummeeting at a transmission specialist in the west of the country. We were shown a presentation and did a tour through the place while our cars were being worked on; I registered mine for a flush, not to fix an issue but to know for sure it has been done at least once now.
It was a bit exciting to get there, knowing I skipped buying winter tires (this winter it has only snowed twice on a day that I had to hit the road) and it had snowed overnight. Luckilly the roads were relatively clean so with adjusted speed I managed to get there. The presentation gave a nice overview of what they do, but the tour was a real eye-opener. They make their own tooling in order to refurbish/fix transmissions and go very far to fix the actual cause of the issue rather than smacking a replacement transmission under the car, which might save time but can still cost more than a focused fix even when it's deep inside the internals. They also work on the electronics and they have several ways of running a transmission or its components on test setups simulating the operation in a car.
Happy that I did it, and I recommend others to do this as well, even when there are no issues. I had no complaints about the car at all but the car felt even smoother during gear changes than it already used to be. Especially a true specialist company like the one I visited, ATR, also have the right equipment to do full diagnostics on the car and transmission. Definitely a morning well spent.
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