Your "1.5%" equates to nearly 9000 transmission problems. Do you have any data to back that up? Otherwise, I would say that you are blowing the issue way out of proportion. That's not to say that buying a new truck with a bad transmission is excusable, but human error is eminent. It's more than likely a fluke rather than a consistent issue.
It appears you're taking 1.5% of
total number of Ridgelines sold since the 2006 model year (600,000) to arrive at the number of transmission failures (9,000) in the 2G which is not correct. I'm confident the failure rate for the 1G's transmission was nowhere near 1.5% based on the lack of reports. We simply didn't see ongoing reports of transmission and torque converter failures and overheating and judder in the first four years of the 1G like we're seeing in the 2G. Again, you won't find 24 reports of failed 1G transmissions on this forum
even after 15 years.
I'm basing my estimate on the best data available to us which includes the number of registered users on this forum and the number of Ridgelines sold to estimate the percentage of Ridgeline owners who are members here. From this, we can estimate how many 2G owners are members. Using this information, we can proportion the number of reports of transmission failures (currently 24) to something closer to reality.
In my previous post, I estimated that around 5% of all Ridgeline owners are members of this forum (I think the actual number is significantly less - the general population doesn't visit automotive forums, but I'm being generous). There have been about 120,000 Ridgelines sold with the 6-speed transmission. If 6,000 of those owners are members here and there have been 24 transmission failures, then that's 0.4%
and counting. If I'm being too generous and only 2% of Ridgeline owners are members of this forum, then that's 24 out of 2,400 failures or 1%
and counting.
This is why I believe the
actual number of transmission failures in 2017-2019 Ridgelines is likely in the hundreds
and climbing. The total number of Ridgelines
sold with 6-speed transmissions is no longer increasing since it now has the 9-speed, but the number of
failures keeps increasing.
I don't care what metric or creative math you use, the sad truth is that the 2G's transmission has a "much" higher failure rate after
4 years than the 1G's had after
15 years. Whether this is due to fundamental design flaws or inconsistent quality I cannot say for certain (I
suspect it's the latter).