Goffy

Hello again and many thanks to all who have looked at the question and given it some consideration :-) Particular thanks to Anthony and Bemused for their informative replies! Unfortunately it is all irrelevant now, young Katie wrote her car off against the central armco of the M5 near Bristol yesterday afternoon, having aquaplaned at speed! She is largely OK, battered and bruised, but not broken. Thanks again everyone. Goffy.

Anyone know whether it's possible/how to, check/top up the transmission fluid in a 2012 Yaris 1.33 CVT? 😎

Interesting thread chaps! In the good old days before GPS I used to drive a lot for my work (40000 - 60000 a year) and very early in my tenancy of a new car would do a primitive speedo calibration by finding a quiet stretch of motorway and timing my progress at an indicated 60mph using the 100 metre marker posts and a stop watch. A mile is 1610 metres, so 16 posts = 1 mile, which should take 1 minute. It almost always took longer, often by more than 10%! The speedos were reading fast. Never had one which read slow. The most accurate was fitted to the family 1986 Citroen CX, I couldn't measure any inaccuracy using this method. For years I was the smart pants cruising past the bottled up traffic and the "70 mph" police car at the front of of it, they were doing less than 70! Never got stopped as a result. If the instrument head unit has an actual needle rotating around an actual dial then it is an old fashioned analogue mechanical device regardless of what it is driven by. Therein lies the problem, simple cost, it is possible to make such instruments much more accurate than they are, but it would be very expensive! A pound saved in every speedo head (and it's MUCH more than that) is saving the maker millions a year.

Apologies if this seems to have been done to death on here, I have done several searches and just got a few clues 😉 My young lodger has the car in the title, a "12" registered one and yesterday she messaged me about a burning smell as she climbed a local hill. I didn't know that the car had a CVT, just assumed it was a conventional auto! So this morning I went to check the ATF level but can't find any way to do this, but as Toyota sell CVT fluid it must be possible to check/top up the fluid? Anyone able to throw any light on this? To fill in a few more details, she has just changed her job, her previous employment was lots of stop start motoring in Exeter, drive ten minutes, park, work for half an hour, repeat all day. While the new job involves driving 20 miles, work all day them drive home. The route is dual carriageway, M5, dual carriageway and includes the BIG climb of Haldon Hill (800ft), this is where she is getting the smell. I am quite prepared to believe that the smell is just things getting hot that haven't been hot for a while, but she is also telling me that the gearbox does "odd" things! Though that could just be a CVT characteristic, her previous mount was a conventional geared auto. Thanks in advance, Goffy.