Any thoughts/comments on this video? Toyota biased, but in general...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULcSauSJrsY
He has some good points and some things I don't necessarily agree with.
I'll go through his points and give my thoughts.
1. Parking Pawl- I've only seen two actually broken in my career, good advice to come to a complete stop. The other side of that is to make sure the vehicle is completely stopped when shifting from Drive to Reverse, vice versa as that will damage the one-way clutch.
2. Transmission Maintenance- Agree with what he says regarding no such thing as lifetime fluid. Service them. The other part of this is the mileage limits he is imposing are not really a thing in our experience. Current condition of the fluid is key. If it is burning, don't touch it, if its old replace it. There is not some magic number that suddenly after 100k miles you cant service it.
3. Warm Up- Yes its a good idea to have fluids at operating temp before you beat on the car. Modern TCMs use different strategies when transmission fluid is cold to account for it taking a little while to warm up. For example the transmission will command a higher line pressure to account for the fluid being thicker.
4. Don't Brake- I have never seen any detrimental effect on a transmission that rev matches when downshifting(which the Skyactiv Drive does). Older transmissions that do not do this it can be hard on them because you're causing some slip. Coast down rev matched downshifts are far less stressful on the transmission than a powered upshift.
5. Stuck in Snow- Agreed, it is very taxing a transmission to sit there with tires spinning, you are generating a ton of heat. I live in the desert and sand has a similar effect. We see tons of failed drivetrain components from playing in the dirt/sand and spinning and suddenly getting traction, this will break shafts and planetaries.
6. The Shifter- Spilled fluids in there definitely break things.
7. Neutral- Skyactiv Drives put themselves in neutral at a stop by relaxing pressure on one of the clutch sets. This is called Neutral Idle Control and is used by a lot of OEMs (including Toyota). It is to help fuel economy because you're not putting load on the engine at a stop. I personally don't like it.