If you follow my blog and know recent news you should know that automotive manufacturers develop nine-speed automatic transmission. This “gear-race” lasts about 10 years, but soon it should stop, says German transmission maker ZF.
Julio Caspari, the North American president of the transmission maker says that his company and others started the race to aid in engine efficiency, allowing cars to run at lower engine speeds. But their incremental gains are becoming minute. According to Caspari in an interview with Automotive News, his company’s current eight-speed is only 11 percent more efficient than its six-speed.
Nowadays many manufacturers use nine-speed transmissions in their car, but don’t forget that these parts are more expensive than effective.
And here Nissan comes to help the automotive world – its transmission (CVT - Continuously Variable Transmission) uses not a fixed numbers of gears, but a chain-link belt that shuffles across two cone-shaped pulleys to give a nearly infinite variability. It’s much more effective and cheaper. So, the war seem to cease down and we are on the verge of a new automotive trend.
