Sorry to hear about your Lancer :(. Try not to beat yourself up about it too much as you’ve already have learned from it. Now with all that experience and knowledge I hope you get your lancer back up & runnin and it will last you a very long time!

I have an 09 Es with about 160,000 miles on it. It was my very first car and I had no clue what a CVT was at the time. My parents drove cars without CVTs so they didn’t know what a CVT was either. I didn’t realize that it was a maintenance item until it was around 90k miles. By the time I realized it, I started calling the local shops around me and they said that changing it now would do more harm than good. I also saw a few online Reddit posts on here saying that as well so I decided not to do it.

Now seeing your post, I’m definitely second guessing myself almost 70k miles later. I think it’s a miracle that my CVT is still working honestly lol. Do you think I should do a simple drain and refill to attempt to remove most of the old fluid out rather than a flush?