China-Made CVT Transmission To Be Produced Next Year
SHANGHAI - July 24, 2007: Luoyang Sanming Industry Co. announced their plans last Thursday to initiate production of China's first independently patented CVT transmission. Production will begin by the first quarter of 2008 with a total investment of 220 million yuan. The planned annual output will be 50,000 units.
Luoyang Sanming Industry Co., Ltd is one of the main private corporations in Henan Province. Having spent five years, from 1997 to 2002, to successfully develop the Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT). The CVT technique owned by Sanming Company is China's only independent intellectual property in the field of advanced automobile technique to be awarded a national invention patent. The use of CVT will make China the third country to have an independent CVT transmission patent behind Germany and Japan.
Experts from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers say CVT transmissions use different gear mechanism which differentiates them from an automatic transmission. CVT operates on an ingenious pulley system that allows an infinite variability between the highest and the lowest gears with no discrete steps or shifts. This eliminates the impact caused by shift changing and transmission torque, thus greatly enhances driving comfort. Moreover, CVT solves the high fuel consumption problem compared with manual gearbox transmission (MT) and automatic transmission (AT).
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2007/07/24/056053.html