Vehicle
Pontiac Aztek
A tall front-drive crossover on GM's U-body minivan platform, sharing its running gear with the Buick Rendezvous and the Montana, which is where to look for anything not documented under its own name. The 3.4 V6 is the only engine of substance and its faults are the family's: intake manifold gaskets that leak coolant into the valley and then into the oil, and a plastic coolant elbow on the crossover pipe that fails without warning. Versatrak all-wheel drive on so-equipped cars is a viscous coupling rear unit with no driver control, so a driveline complaint there is usually the coupling itself rather than anything electronic.
Generations
-
First generation 2001–2005
U-body minivan platform shared with the Buick Rendezvous; 3.4 V6 intake gaskets and the plastic coolant elbow dominate.
- Body styles
- SUV
- Platform
- GM U-body
- Engines
-
- 3.4 V6 — LA1 · petrol
- Transmissions
- 4-speed 4T65-E automatic
- Drivetrain
- Front-wheel drive · Four-wheel drive
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.
Posted about the Pontiac Aztek
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 Pontiac Aztek.