micke_o
Was that automatic or manual trannys breaking down on you? If it's eating trannys like that I would suspect some other cause than bad trannys (even though the manual ones aren't known to be indestructable...).
Uhm - eating O2-sensors too you say. Tuning chip = lots of torque killing tranny and causing the fuel/air mixture to be other than perfect? Or just bad luck :-(
Bad Luck.
It was bone stock, with the auto with the "sport shift" or whatever cutesy name GM gave it.
My stepmom had it first, and she's the most cautious driver I know. The transmission blew up twice on her, and when we sold it it was slipping out of second. (and no longer under warranty)
When I say blew up, the car just shut down on the side of the road and would not start again, popping up a message on the infotainment system that read "gearbox malfunction: contact saab service immediately." Sometimes it was a fluke and the car would start again, between five and twenty minutes later. Two of those times it was not a joke and my stepmom was stranded for an hour until a towtruck came. She also got a few flukes of the transmission error. I don't know if it was a sensor going bad somewhere that controlled the entire slushbox, but something was not right, even on the third go-around.
I took "ownership" of the car at about 58,000 miles and it was on transmission number three. When we dumped it two years later (I was afraid of it giving me the error that was becoming more and more common) it had 84,000 miles on it and it was "slipping out of second" according to our independent mechanic.
JCE, if you can find one that's screwed together right, they're fantastic cars. Seriously. Fair amount of room, quite good roadholding, a great interior, and they're very zippy even with the 2.0t.
The 2.0T (the 210 horse variant, the Vector) is a rocketship if it makes the 2.0t look slow. I'm frightened of what the 2.8 does if I can have so much fun with the base engine.