GEARBOXES made in China but designed by Albury’s DSI engineers are expected to play a big role in the parent company’s big sales drive.
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Geely Auto this week announced record car sales from its Chinese factories last year. It turned out 483,483 cars, up 164 per cent on a year earlier.
It exported 100,300 of them.
Geely hopes this year to sell 560,000 cars — about 10,780 a week. Last’s month’s production as a record 59,564 cars.
Geely used the Beijing Motor Show in May to unveil a five-speed version of the Gleagle GX7, a sports utility built in Chengdu in Sichuan province.
Executives said the new 2.0 litre and 2.4-litre GX7 models would feature a six-speed auto gearbox from the DSI stable as Chinese gearbox production was stepped up.
The six-speed automatic transmission produced in China has a manual-shift mode developed by DSI which is said to need only 0.3 seconds to shift gear and it is designed to be serviced after a 250,000 kilometres.
Chinese media this week cited Geely’s 2009 purchase of the liquidated Drivetrain Systems International as the move that “broke the foreign monopoly” of the supply of six-speed automatic transmissions in China.
“Through three years of efforts in technology localization and matching, Geely brought in the most advanced automatic production line from Japan and the US,” The Global Times reported.
“Its plants were established in Xiangtan, Jining and Chongqing to start mass production of DSI automatic transmissions and now its capacity has reached 300,000 units,” it said.
DSI, which also has a technical centre at Springvale, Melbourne, continues to manufacture gearboxes for SsangYong and Mahindra at its Kaitlers Road, Lavington, factory.
The Lavington factory also produces gearboxes for SsangYong, a Korean manufacturer owned by Indian company Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.
The Global Times reports that among Geely/DSI products under design were a high- torque seven-speed and eight-speed automatic transmission, a hybrid transmission, a dual clutch transmission and a continuously variable transmission.