Blackstone Labs ATF fluid report - 2010 Prius

Definitely high aluminum level. You can tell they are a little surprised to not see other high levels of anything else, that’s because there is no clutch packs or anything else like in a traditional automatic.

The most important thing is at least changing the fluid once, preferably early on like you did. This fluid probably could be good for a while more, but it’s cheap and easy to replace.

 

... and I wonder what exactly "Universal Averages" is for. If it is for "normal" transmissions that use ATF-WS, I would not expect the numbers to match. Our transaxles are very different.

And when they say, "If it's shifting okay," it also makes me wonder if the analysis is properly considering such a different type of AT as we have.

If it were my car, I'd ask them about it.

Thanks for posting these numbers for others to compare to.

 

Yeah I thought the “shifting okay” comment was pretty funny!

honestly they probably don’t care what type of vehicle or transaxle this comes from, they are just doing the lab work.

I’d like to use Blakestone labs some day.

 

I wonder why they didn't comment on the high reading for zinc? Aluminum and zinc are often alloyed and the excess readings show a similar ratio.

Perhaps Blackstone could explain this.

 

Zinc is an additive.

 

+1

Might be worth a follow-up email to explain that in this application the fluid is essentially used as gear oil vs a traditional automatic transmission where is is essentially used as hydraulic fluid. It would be interesting to get their take on it.

BTW, they should have some experience in this area. Many Borg Warner manual transmission from the 80s used Dexron ATF instead of traditional gear oil.