NEW YORK--General Motors extended its warranty on the VTi continuously variable transmission for 2002-2004 models of the Saturn Vue and Ion, reported The New York Times. The warranty, which used to cover three years or 36,000 miles, was stretched to 5 years or 75,000 miles.

GM is taking the precaution because it is concerned about the CVT steel belt's durability, said GM spokesperson Debbie Frakes.

"In the field, we have seen very limited instances of belt failure, but we don't know if the causes of those belt failure(s) are related to the condition we discovered in the tests (internal high-speed testing)," said Frakes.

GM has produced about 82,000 Saturn CVTs since the transmission became available in May 2002. The company stopped producing the transmissions on Jan. 6 at the Fiat GM powertrain plant in Hungary and stopped building Vues and Ions with the CVT at the Saturn assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. GM recalibrated a stock of CVTs for use when production starts again at the end of March.

The Vue can also come with a five-speed manual and five-speed automatic transmission but the only other option for the Ion Quad Coupe is a five-speed manual transmission. GM began producing Ion coupes with automatic transmission March 1.