On June 16, FOTON’s automatic transmission launch ceremony was held at the FOTON & ZF joint venture plant in Zhejiang, China. With the theme of “Changing your Driving”, the event launched heavy-duty, medium-duty, and light-duty automatic transmissions for all series, bringing full-scenario automatic transmission technology and product solutions to the logistics industry, offering customers a more comfortable, safe, fuel-efficient, reliable, and intelligent logistics environment, and leading the industry to a new journey of automatic transmission commercial vehicles.
All products attributes of safety, fuel efficiency, comfort, intelligence and reliability are conducive to significantly reducing the fatigue level and driving skill proficiency level of truck drivers, improving driving comfort, safety and vehicle fuel economy. Combined with factors such as consumption upgrade, customer youngerization trend, new energy and hybrid products accelerating penetration, the large-scale commercialization prospects of commercial vehicle automatic transmission products are promising in the future. Chang Rui, chairman of Foton Motor Group, said that by 2023, FOTON will accelerate the promotion of all-series commercial vehicle products into the new era of automatic transmission. Next, it will focus on promoting the full-line development of medium and light-duty automatic transmission products, opening up a new era of FOTON’s automatic transmission. By 2025, it will achieve a penetration rate of 80% for heavy trucks and 50% for medium and light trucks, with an overall penetration rate exceeding 50%. By 2030, it will achieve full automation.
As early as 2017, FOTON joined forces with ZF, a global leading gearbox company, to establish a joint venture company to produce manual and automatic transmissions for the commercial vehicle market. It has achieved sales of nearly 580,000 automatic transmissions so far, ranking first in China. Since 2019, it has led the Chinese heavy truck industry into the era of automatic transmission with AUMAN heavy duty truck as the leader and made automatic transmission business as its core strategy. Now AUMAN heavy duty truck’s automatic transmission share has exceeded 60%, ranking first in the industry sales volume for four consecutive years with a cumulative sales volume of more than 100,000 units.
The medium and heavy-duty AMTs launched this time adopt an electro-pneumatic technology route that can share the chassis air source and have a large driving force; light-duty AMTs adopt an electro-hydraulic technology route that can flexibly adapt to air brake and liquid brake chassis while being sensitive in action, fast response and high shift comfort; together they bring customers reliable, safe, comfortable, fuel-efficient, intelligent core value. Among them , the heavy-duty automatic transmission, namely ZF’s second-generation TraXon AMT gearbox, is about to be mass-produced by FOTON & ZF joint venture company, further improving fuel economy and driving comfort. Matching the first-generation TraXon automatic transmission AUMAN heavy duty truck has been widely recognized by the Chinese and overseas markets in four years. In Colombia, FOTON AUMAN automatic transmission heavy duty truck has achieved a market share of first .
The medium-duty automatic transmissions cover two major products , 6AS and 9AS, based on ZF’s century-old gearbox structure design experience, with a transmission efficiency of up to 99.7%, coupled with intelligent shifting that simulates excellent driving habits and more reasonable and intelligent idle gear sliding, achieving fuel consumption reduction by 3-5%.The light-duty automatic transmissions cover two products, 5AMT and 6AMT, which are external electro-hydraulic AMT products developed based on FOTON & ZF’s existing manual gearbox platform. They take into account the low-gear power performance and high-gear economic performance needs, covering all models of FOTON’s new light truck platform. It has achieved remarkable results in solving pain points such as frequent start-stop, driving fatigue, high fuel consumption, etc. for light duty truck users.
In the future industry background where electrification trend is obvious, FOTON signed a strategic cooperation agreement with ZF on April 18 this year to jointly create a new generation of electric drive products. The joint venture company will officially introduce ZF’s latest commercial vehicle electric drive products to further help FOTON and other commercial vehicle manufacturers transform and upgrade to new energy and sustainable development, providing cleaner, safer and more efficient next-generation travel solutions.
The global launch of FOTON’s full-series automatic transmissions indicates that FOTON will continue to make technological breakthroughs and innovations, create products with higher performance, more comfort and intelligent safety, provide customers with more comfortable, safe, fuel-efficient, reliable and intelligent value experience, continuously empower the logistics industry with high efficiency, and “Change Your Driving”.
