China's automatic transmission independent development must be quick

Recently, the reporter conducted an investigation into the situation of vehicles equipped with transmissions on the Beijing auto market. It was found that in the field of conventional manual transmissions, products of independent brands have a great advantage, especially in the transmission market of trucks. In the passenger car market where the use of automatic transmissions is the largest, the products of foreign companies and joint ventures occupy a large area. Part of the share.

The models that are hot in the market are almost the same for foreign companies and joint venture transmission companies. Only domestic Chery and Geely cars use self-developed automatic transmissions. From this fact we can see that the challenges faced by the self-owned brand transmission companies are great.

Since 2007, automatic transmissions have become the most imported auto parts in China. With the development of the auto market, the import value has increased year after year. If the Chinese auto industry cannot break this bottleneck, it can only pay for this weak item for a long time.

There are two reasons for the large number of imports of automatic transmissions: First, there is a lack of core technologies for independent brand enterprises, and they do not have large-scale production capabilities. Second, the localization of foreign-funded automatic transmission enterprises in China has been slow.

On April 18 of this year, China's first self-developed CVT CVT was off the assembly line at Chery. This marked a major breakthrough in the development of automatic transmissions in China. While the self-owned brands have made progress, foreign automatic transmission manufacturers have significantly accelerated their pace of deployment in China. In September 2009, the new plant of Gatco (Guangzhou) Automatic Transmission Co., Ltd., which annually produced 140,000 CVTs, was completed, mainly for the passenger cars of Dongfeng Nissan. In May of this year, Volkswagen was the only DSG outside Germany. The dual-clutch automatic transmission plant was formally put into operation in Dalian, Liaoning, with a production capacity of 300,000 units in the first phase. In the first half of this year, the SAIC-Magnesti Marelli joint venture settled in Jiading, Shanghai to produce AMT (mechanical automatic transmission) core components.

For the self-owned brand transmission companies, the new situation has brought new opportunities as well as greater challenges. For the Chinese auto industry, mastering the core technologies of automatic transmissions is the way to go.