Chrysler TorqueFlite

TorqueFlite is a name rather than a gearbox, and that is the only important thing about it. Chrysler has used it since 1956, and the cars on this site wearing it carry a three-speed (the Neon's 31TH, the Wrangler TJ's 32RH), a four-speed (the Durango's, the Ram's 48RE) and — in the Ram 1500 DS — an eight-speed which is a ZF 8HP built under licence.

So the name tells a reader almost nothing and is very likely to mislead them. Two cars a decade apart, both described as having a TorqueFlite, may share no part and no procedure; and one of them is a German gearbox with a large European service literature filed under a different name entirely.

What to establish instead is the ratio count and the internal code — 31TH, 32RH, 48RE, 8HP70 — which is on the transmission and in the build sheet. Every useful answer follows from that and none follows from the marketing name.

The classic three- and four-speeds do share a lineage worth knowing: they descend from the A904 and A727, they are simple, they are extraordinarily well documented, and their common failures are the governor, the band adjustment and the overdrive unit on the four-speeds. The eight-speed shares none of it — see the ZF 8HP.