A good chunk of my previous posts have been complaining about the terrible shift quality in my car. The clutch performance after a complete replacement at the dealership has been atrocious. After 4200 miles, turns out the release bearing was defective and did a ton of damage.
Timeline looks like:
Delivery to dealership - 2300 miles: Thieves take the car off the lot and tear it up real good. Dealership recovers the car, repairs body damage and glass, and sells it to me at a steep discount with a full warranty.
2300 - 2575 miles: Dealership states clutch is "working as designed" until the car is virtually non-operational. I shout many bad words and escalate to the chief operations officer of the dealership chain, threatening to call Mitsubishi corporate and initiate a dispute. Dealership FINALLY performs a complete clutch replacement under warranty since clutch disk material is indeed all over the place when they open the transmission. It still doesn't shift well when I get it back, so they perform a cable adjustment, give me the expensive all-weather floor mats and tell me this is as good as it gets.
5450 miles: Clutch performance sucks and is getting worse. Dealership promptly and properly addresses an a/c problem (compressor was overcharged), still states the clutch is "working as designed" even though there is a terrible noise on takeoff, the shifter hangs up between gears and the car sometimes will not go into reverse unless the engine is turned off.
6780 miles: Release bearing is making the classic death squeal. I bet the service writer a cheeseburger if the new "throwout" bearing isn't defective. I then talk again with the COO and chief sales manager about trading it in to order a new Mirage that has never been stolen, in a color I like and with the Rockford-Fosgate stereo. I now technically do owe the service writer a cheeseburger since these cars don't have throwout bearings, they have release bearings.
But they bought me a complete new clutch, again, so we're square. The nonplussed service manager showed me the parts and said he'd be showing them to his Mitsubishi representative too, since this car is costing them an awful lot of money. I'm kicking myself for not getting pictures. The new release bearing was not moving freely and had been cutting a groove into the pressure plate so deep that a couple of the fingers would have broken off if it had been driven that way much longer. I didn't look at the clutch disk but it's on the service statement as well. All the service guys very gracefully acknowledged that I had been alerting them of a problem all along and this doesn't reflect on my driving, if anything the opposite, and my warranty will continue to stand. Our current bet is whether I'll have any further problems with the car, if I decide not to trade it in.