Also known as: torqueflite, torque flite, torqueflite 8, 32rh, 48re, a904, a727, 42re, 44re, 46re, 30rh, 36rh, 46rh, a998, a500
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.
Cars fitted with this gearbox
5 generations. Only where a source names the model and the generation together — a gearbox is documented as a product far more often than as a fitment, so this list is deliberately shorter than the truth.
Dodge
Jeep
Ram
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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