Autonomous transmission crisis

It is understood that on November 26, 2012, the first "China Automotive Transmission Technology Development Seminar" was successfully held. At the meeting, some experts said that the domestic transmission industry is facing a period of rapid transition from manual to automatic. If the industrialization of independent products cannot be achieved quickly, the autonomous automatic transmission industry will be destroyed. Moreover, it is impossible to rely on the introduction of mastering the core technology of the transmission. Only the road of independent innovation can be firmly pursued.

Previously, the person in charge of a self-owned brand automobile research institute had publicly stated that the automatic transmission has always been a major technical bottleneck for domestic auto makers. According to statistics, China's automatic transmissions rely on imports for a long period of time, and the growth rate is significant. In 2001, China’s imports of automatic transmissions were 480 million U.S. dollars. By 2009, this figure had rapidly grown to 5.56 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 11 times. The main reason is that Chinese companies do not have the core technology of automatic transmission and can only be controlled by people. At present, most of the automatic transmissions introduced by China belong to the technologies that are nearly eliminated in foreign countries, while the Chinese-foreign joint ventures and cooperative automatic transmission companies have their core technologies in the hands of foreign counterparts. Even with foreign companies controlled by the Chinese side, China’s independent innovation capability is not strong. Ultimately, the current share of China's own transmission brand market is only 23%. Of these 23%, the vast majority belong to low-end products, and high-end products must all rely on imports.

When the self-owned brand was caught in the crisis of automatic transmission, the localization strategies of multinational companies such as Japan's Aisin, Aida, ZF, Bosch, and BorgWarner in the United States made it even more difficult for independent brands. Although in recent years, autonomous automakers such as Geely and Chery have invested heavily in research and development of automatic transmissions with independent intellectual property rights, some private enterprises and research institutes are also devoting themselves to research and development of automatic transmissions. However, under the influence of many factors such as insufficient funds, decentralized basic technology of transmission, and lack of policies, industrialization difficulties have been difficult to break through.