Toyota C-series / E-series (C59, E351)
5-speed manual · transverse · 1977–2013
Also known as: c59, c50, c52, c56, e351, e352, e353, toyota 5-speed transaxle, e153, c60, c64, c554, e350, e53, eb60, ec60, ec65, eg60
Toyota's transverse five-speed manual transaxles — the older C-series (C50, C59) and the E-series (E351, E353) that replaced it, in the Corolla, Matrix, Solara, Scion xB, and the Pontiac Vibe and Chevrolet Prizm built alongside them.
The Vibe and the Prizm are Corollas, which is the reason this page reaches four marques: a Pontiac owner researching a gearbox fault is researching a Toyota transaxle, and Pontiac's own literature barely exists.
These are among the most trouble-free manual gearboxes on this site, which changes what a symptom means. A vague or notchy change on one of them is the shift cables and their bushings in the great majority of cases — not the gearbox — and that is a cheap repair regularly mistaken for an expensive one.
Where something inside does wear it is the third-gear synchro, crunching on a fast change and nowhere else. A crunch into every gear is the clutch not releasing, which is hydraulic and outside the gearbox.
They take a gear oil, not ATF — the opposite of the AX-15 — and Toyota's specification is thinner than a conventional 80W-90, which is what makes a wrongly filled one notchy when cold.
Cars fitted with this gearbox
6 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.
Chevrolet
Scion
Toyota
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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