2007 Aveo5 Owner here. Bought her straight off the lot. And for the most part I've been pretty happy with my little roller skate. Yeah, the mileage stinks for such a small car. Yeah, it collects a scratch or dent if you look at it wrongly. Yeah, it is cheaply built--heck I only paid $8400 and change (as a loss leader) new off the lot in 2007--it has treated me pretty well for the past 84,000 miles. Hard to scoff at $.10/mile transportation! I love it for parking downtown or zipping about easily. Sure, I have to explain to many kids how to manually roll the windows down and remind them to lock the doors, but they eventually figure it out. For $8400 I was glad to have all four wheels AND a spare!

There have been a few problems: door handle screws backing themselves out..., interior trim popping free here/there. Then I've had a right front strut blow out that the local repair place wanted $500+ to fix (declined, it's noisy but drives fine...) Then I went car camping with the Aveo.


I'm presuming that somewhere along the 15-20+ miles of unpaved gravel roads it fell out. Or, it could have happened somewhere else along the life of the car, who knows...but the hole/mount looked clean when I checked, so this was probably recent event. The "It" is referring to the lower of the three ($8.64) trans-axle mount bolts. This was without my knowledge, but put theories together after the fact... Apparently everything was still humming along nicely even though it was missing, however, after failing to avoid ONE pothole when the light was playing tricks on me, there was a pronounced THUNK. And then things got bad.

When ever I applied power from the engine the manual stick lurched forwards. First, Third and Reverse would not even stay in gear but for a moment to get things moving. I limped along home up/down miles more of graveled roads out of the wilderness only to roll into a dealer and find that in light of the missing the support of the lower bolt, the middle bolt tore the top of the transmission clear off--it was hanging there by a single bolt & the engine. There should be no reason for one of these bolts to be missing in the first place, but it is horrific to find that now I have to replace the $1881.00 transaxle (dealer price for just the parts.)


Thankfully, I didn't require a tow out of the wilderness, but I did have to tow it 340 miles home (thanks U-Haul!) It is sitting peacefully in my garage waiting for me to pull it apart. Sounds like I'll be doing a clutch, timing belt & strut and brakes while I'm at it...and then just before we left I get the Recall Notice about the ignition issue. UGH! Even still, I'm pretty happy with that little car...now to get to work.

Glad to have found a forum like this...I suspect we'll be chatting in the near future. I welcome your suggestions and guidance on next steps. I'm planning to undertake this in my garage so I would welcome any and all input. I've done exactly ONE auto engine rebuild in my life and actually counted it a success when I got it running again--it was not on the Aveo. Thanks in advance for all your recommendations.