That sinking feeling when your Q3 transmission starts acting up on a Friday evening

[yardleybickford]

So there I was, just finishing up a long week and looking forward to a relaxing weekend, when my 2017 Q3 decides to throw a curveball at me on the drive home from work. I'd noticed a couple of weird shifts over the past few days, nothing major, just a slight hesitation when pulling away from traffic lights, but I told myself it was probably just the heat or maybe I was imagining things. Then Friday evening came and I was sitting in stop-start traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road when the car started shuddering every time I tried to move forward, like the gearbox couldn't decide what it wanted to do, and then this awful grinding noise came from under the car that made my blood run cold. I managed to limp it to the nearest petrol station and just sat there for a good ten minutes trying to figure out what to do, because of course this had to happen right before the weekend when every garage is about to close. I called a mate who's pretty handy with cars and he said it sounds like the transmission might be on its way out, which is basically my worst nightmare come true. He mentioned that for proper Audi Transmission Repair Musaffah is actually where a lot of the decent specialists are based, so I'm planning to make some calls on Sunday morning and hopefully find somewhere that can look at it without keeping my car for weeks on end. I'm absolutely dreading the diagnosis because I know these repairs aren't cheap, but at this point I just want to get it sorted and have my car back to normal. Has anyone else had a similar experience where their Q3 transmission started acting up suddenly like this, and what was the outcome? I'm trying to mentally prepare myself for the worst-case scenario but I'd love to hear if anyone got lucky and it turned out to be something relatively minor. Just my luck really, I was supposed to be heading to RAK this weekend but instead I'm sitting here stressing about gearboxes.