tomrose

I asked basically the same question about a month ago. If you are ready for more information than you can "Shake A Stick At" then go to this thread. Just use Search and type in tires & xmission damage. You'll spend about an hour reading a wealth of info about this often confusing subject....Enjoy!

My dad has been driving Subaru's for years. His mechanic has been working on Subarus exclusively for decades. His mechanic has always warned that if you get a tire failure and the tire is not repairable, that you must replace all 4 tires so that the tire tread is always maintained as exactly the same between the four. The mechanic claims that driving the vehicle with tire treads unmatched on even one wheel will damage the transmission (automatic) over time. The only option to replacing all four if one has a catastrophic failure would be to find a used tire with exactly (or almost I assume) the same tread depth and profile. If this is fact, then there must be some type of window used to gauge at what point the mismatch occurs. In other words, how much difference in tire depth or profile constitutes a mismatch great enough to cause transmission failure. Can anyone please enlighten me on this subject? Fact or myth and if fact, to what extend does the mismatch have to be in order to cause transmission failure. Thank You.