Magna T355

The five-speed manual transaxle in Chrysler's compact front-drive cars — the Caliber, Journey, Sebring, Jeep Compass and Patriot.

It is the manual half of the platform whose automatic half is the Dualogic-era CVT, and that is the practical point: on these cars the manual and the automatic have entirely separate reputations, and the automatic's is much the worse. A Compass or Patriot with this gearbox is a different proposition from one with the CVT, and a listing that says only manual or automatic is the whole of the difference.

Its recurring complaint is the clutch and its hydraulics rather than the gearbox. A bite point that has climbed, a pedal that stays down, or a gear that will not engage when hot are all the concentric slave cylinder and the master — and the slave lives inside the bellhousing, so a cheap part becomes a gearbox-out job and is worth replacing whenever the clutch is done.

The gearbox itself is unremarkable, which on a page like this is worth saying plainly: second-gear synchro wear and linkage bushings account for most of what is genuinely wrong with them, and both behave as they do on any transverse five-speed.