How to Check Your Transmission Fluid in a Vehicle

"Hi! I’m William Myers with Subaru for Expert Village. Now we’re going to check your automatic transmission fluid or also known as ATF but first let’s go to the car and look at the dip stick. If you look straight down right below the master cylinder right underneath the hose there’s a yellow dip stick handle, there’s nothing on it it’s just a yellow handle, that’s your ATF dip stick but when you check the ATF on an automatic Subaru the engine’s got to be running. So let’s start the engine so we can check our ATF or automatic transmission fluid, now that the engine’s started we put our hand down, we pull out the dip stick, wipe it off, reinstall all the way down, pull it out and we look at the dip stick and as you can see on this car this fluid level is right between the low and high marks. Now I’m going to tell you something about this dip stick, on a Subaru dip stick on the automatic transmission fluid you’re going to see two notches or two dots at the bottom, two dots at the top. The two dots at the bottom means that if the fluid level, when the engine is cold is between these two dots your fluid level is right. If the fluid level is between these two top dots after the engine has been ran a while then that means it’s right too, so ATF has a tendency to expand the hotter it gets and since this car was running a little while ago me having my fluid level right about there this engine has the right amount of ATF in it. Okay now all you’ve got to do is just reinstall your automatic transmission fluid dip stick also known as ATF and that’s how you check your fluid level."