Also known as: cvt250, vt40, vt25e, mrg, gm cvt
General Motors' CVT250 — the belt CVT in the Malibu, the Trailblazer and the small crossovers around them.
⚑ General Motors spent thirty years avoiding the CVT and then adopted one, which is why so little institutional knowledge sits behind it: a technician who has spent a career on 4T65-E and 6T70 automatics has no CVT intuition to bring, and the diagnostic habits from a planetary gearbox do not transfer.
Its health is the belt and the pulleys, and both are decided by fluid. GM specifies its own CVT fluid; DEXRON is not a substitute, and the substitution is behind most reported juddering and slipping.
Simulated shift steps are deliberate. The control strategy imitates a stepped automatic under acceleration because drivers dislike a CVT's flare — so a report of it changes gear strangely is usually describing designed behaviour.
Shudder from rest is the standing complaint and is more often torque-converter lock-up than the variator itself, which is worth establishing before anything expensive is proposed.
Cars fitted with this gearbox
1 generation. 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.
Chevrolet
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
Be the first to write this up
Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
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.
Sign in or create an account to add what you found about CVT250 (VT40).