PULSCAR ANALYSIS — P0741 (TORQUE CONVERTER CLUTCH CIRCUIT PERFORMANCE OR STUCK OFF) AND TORQUE CONVERTER CLUTCH SHUDDER IN NHTSA'S PUBLIC FILES PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026. License: CC BY 4.0 Attribution: "PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026." Published alongside https://www.pulscar.io/blog/p0741-code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Prepared September 2026. Source data: NHTSA public flat files (complaints received 2015 to 21 September 2026, 780,071 records; manufacturer communications; recalls from 2010) and documents downloaded from static.nhtsa.gov. 1. Complaints (2,872, all read in full, two readers) First search: every complaint whose narrative names P0741 (a letter O for the zero, a space, hyphen or dot after the P, a two-character suffix such as P074100, or a bare 741 after "code", "codes", "dtc", "error" or "cel"), a companion code (P0740, P0742, P0743, P0744, P2769, P2770), or torque converter clutch wording ("torque converter clutch", "torque converter lock-up", "TCC", "converter shudder", "lock-up clutch/solenoid/shudder", shudder within a few words of "torque converter"): 472 complaints. Completeness audit: before writing, an independent audit searched the same file for what the first search missed — glued spellings, other converter clutch codes, converter wording, misspellings, bulletin numbers owners quote, and transmission or CVT shudder and judder wording — and 2,400 more were added (tiers A 701, B 691, C 1,014; see "Pool history" in codebook.txt). The found_by and found_by_pattern columns say which search and which rule found each complaint. Coding: the codebook (codebook.txt) was written, dated and hashed before any complaint was read. Two independent classification passes coded all 2,872 separately, each from the codebook only, without seeing the other's codes, each seeing only the codebook and its batch of complaints. One category (N not about the converter clutch on the owner's car; T transmission replaced, rebuilt, recommended or quoted; C torque converter replaced or condemned; S solenoid, valve body or wiring; F fluid or software; O another stated cause; U not diagnosed or not stated) and three flags (shudder, stall_or_power_loss, returned_after_repair). Agreement: category 2,593 of 2,872 (90.3%), Cohen's kappa 0.87; shudder 2,817, kappa 0.96; stall or power loss 2,773, kappa 0.93; returned after repair 2,815, kappa 0.94. Every disagreement (428 complaints differing on at least one field) was read in full and settled under the written adjudication rules in codebook.txt; a consistency pass over the agreed codes corrected 53 more. The complaints file carries both passes' original codes (coder1_*, coder2_*), the final code, the resolution and the rule applied. Final: not about the converter clutch (N) 71; of the 2,801 relevant: not diagnosed or not stated (U) 1,186, converter (C) 672, transmission (T) 571, fluid or software (F) 251, solenoid, valve body or wiring (S) 61, another cause (O) 60. Shudder 1,921; stall or power loss 971; returned after a repair 570. 113 complaints name P0741 (all relevant; one of them, ODI 10981176, writes it glued to other text as "CODEP0741" and was found by the audit). Makes among the 2,801: Ford 566, Chevrolet 515, Nissan 350, Toyota 274, Honda 239, GMC 236, Subaru 220, Acura 55, Dodge 39, Infiniti 39, and others. Median model year 2016; median reported mileage 82,850 (1,207 complaints give an odometer reading from 101 to 300,000 miles). By year received: 2015 138, 2016 128, 2017 125, 2018 172, 2019 275, 2020 211, 2021 178, 2022 197, 2023 237, 2024 290, 2025 464, 2026 (to 21 September) 386. Model subsets quoted in the article use the model years printed in the bulletin concerned (for example 18-NA-355: 2015-2018 Silverado and Sierra 1500, 2015-2017 Escalade, Escalade ESV, Yukon and Yukon XL, 2016-2019 Camaro, ATS and CTS, 2016-2018 CT6, 2015-2019 Corvette, 2017-2019 Colorado and Canyon); the complaints file has no engine or trim field, so trims outside a bulletin cannot be removed. Mention counts: of the 251 fluid-or-software (F) complaints, 172 mention the fluid (the narrative contains fluid, flush, ATF or drain, case-insensitive) and 99 mention software (software, reprogram, reflash, re-flash, flash, updat-, recalibrat- or program). 975 of the relevant complaints come from the broadest tier (C: transmission or CVT shudder wording without the converter named); readers kept them as relevant under rule R13 when the owner places the shudder in the transmission while driving. Figures count complaints, not vehicles. 2. Owner-reported amounts (454) Every dollar figure in the relevant complaints for a diagnosis or test, a fluid or software service, a solenoid, valve body, wiring or lead-frame repair, a torque converter, a transmission rebuild or replacement, or another repair a shop named for this fault, whether paid, billed, quoted or offered; excluded: towing, rentals, tires, vehicle prices and payments, incomes, deposits, goodwill splits and owner shares after goodwill, owners' own price research, repeats of the same figure, and totals that mix unrelated work (two such totals were removed after the extraction). 326 figures are quotes, 85 described as paid, 27 billed, 13 not stated, 3 offered. The first 472 complaints were decided under the same rule; the 2,400 added complaints were decided under the written rule and every included figure was checked by script against the narrative. File: p0741-owner-reported-amounts.csv (group, status, what it was for). 3. Manufacturer documents (624 distinct, read) and recall documents (29 read) First search: every manufacturer communication whose NHTSA index summary names P0741, a companion code or converter clutch wording (414 records). Completeness audit: an independent audit re-ran and widened the search (other converter clutch codes, converter judder and shudder programs, Nissan and Infiniti judder bulletins, GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda and Subaru shudder bulletins) and added 272 records. After removing 70 byte-identical copies (md5) and 3 records with no PDF on NHTSA, 623 distinct documents were read: 372 from the first search, 251 from the audit. A third search during the cross-check of our older guides found one more, Ford TSB 26-2171 (April 2026, supersedes 25-2154), read in full: 624 in all. Near-identical revisions (5-word shingle Jaccard 0.6 or more) were read sentence by sentence against a copy read in full; page images were read where the text layer was empty or scrambled; 14 long Nissan CVT judder bulletins (11,000 to 18,000 words) were read in their opening pages, flow charts, claims and amendment sections with a keyword sweep of the rest (marked "partly" in the documents file). Of the 624: 156 direct, 35 list the code among others, 405 related, 28 not relevant. 73 print P0741 in their own text (as P0741, P074100 or Mercedes-Benz fault 0741). Recall documents: filings of safety recalls 12V-006, 17V-427, 18V-390, 18V-901 and 20V-365 (converter or transmission replacement), cited by documents or complaints: 29 dealer notices, owner letters, technical instructions and Part 573 reports read in full, 22 acknowledgement and filing notices listed as not read. None names P0741. Every verbatim quote in the article was checked by script against the document or complaint text; quotes from image-only documents were checked against transcriptions of the page images (pdf_audit/*.ocr.txt in our working files), spot-checked by eye. Coverage status in September 2026 is our computation from the terms printed in each document, not a statement by the manufacturer. Limits: complaints over-represent frightening and expensive events; owners report the diagnosis as they understood it; the broadest shudder tier includes some shudders that are not the converter clutch (coded U when no cause is stated); searches of NHTSA's index cannot see bulletins whose summary is blank or codes that appear only inside a PDF. Nothing here is a failure rate.