The automatic transmission of new energy heavy-duty trucks has always been a card neck technology in China's automotive industry. When domestic manual transmission manufacturers are investing heavily in automatic transmission research and development, a 5-year-old technology start-up company located in Jinshan, Shanghai, has quietly overcome the key software and hardware control problems.
It is the "hidden champion" of the mainland's new energy heavy-duty truck drive system, Tebaijia Power Technology Co., Ltd., which won the National Excellence Award on behalf of the Shanghai heavy-duty truck innovators in the recently concluded 2021 China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.
Starting a business is a difficult start
In the Jinshan Industrial Zone on the outskirts of Shanghai, there is a humble "small" enterprise. However, the innovation road it has traveled has blown the wind of Tripaky Best Power in just 5 years to domestic new energy heavy-duty trucks. In 2021, 9,650 of the 10,400 new energy heavy trucks listed on the road across the country are pure electric vehicles, accounting for 92.36%, of which 5135 are tractors, and more than 60% of pure electric tractors are equipped with the drive system of Tripaky.
Huang Gaocheng, co-founder and general manager of the company, noticed when looking through the industry report that the top four heavy-duty truck brands in the national pure electric tractor terminal sales last year were Hanma Technology, Zhilan Automobile, SAIC Hongyan and Beiben Heavy Duty Truck, and the powertrain system produced by his own company ranked in the top four in 2021. In addition to his joy and pride, he still remembers how the entrepreneurial team, which was still in the product development stage in the second year of the company, held hands with major customers for the first time.
It was a stormy day
"I'm debugging products with engineers in a cold building. There were some problems in the experiment, such as a little drift when turning, and a large impact when braking, so we adjusted it in the software. "The whole commissioning work was done day and night, until the car ran smoothly on the road, and I don't know how many late nights it was." We went to eat a bowl of instant noodles to celebrate, the bowl of instant noodles is really hot! ”
Domestic heavy truck innovation acceleration
Founded in 2016, Telbago Power Technology has caught up with the transformation of Chinese buses to embrace new energy. "We not only see the prosperity of new energy buses, but also see the picture of trucks, buses, and other engineering vehicles moving towards new energy in the next few years." The entrepreneurial team of Tripaky comes from one of the two best drive companies in the world, holding the "diamond diamond" of technology research and development, and has a deep industry accumulation, and has been keenly watching the new wind direction of new energy development. From the familiar hybrid system to the rapid development of pure electric power, to the increasingly hot hydrogen fuel cell power, the company aims at the market in a three-pronged manner and lays out innovative technology routes.
Unlike new energy passenger cars and buses, which only need motors to achieve high torque and high power, heavy trucks from 14 tons to hundreds of tons need to use gearboxes, and a single motor is far from being able to output torque to meet demand. When heavy-duty trucks encounter new energy, automatic transmissions that can sense the speed of the car and the driver's operation and automatically switch gears have become a "stuck neck" problem that the industry urgently needs to crack.
The Tripaky team not only raised the product standard, but also greatly shortened the product development cycle, and finally overcame the key problems of the automatic transmission control system and formed its own innovative advantages. "What kind of gear, how much torque is needed, how much power the battery produces, how the motor rotates, this is a system engineering."
The entrepreneurial team has expanded to more than 100 people
Tripaky has formed an automatic transmission R&D team, a motor electronic control R&D team, and a system integration control team, which constitutes a core R&D force with strong power, and injects innovative "acceleration" into the mainland heavy trucks from manual speed to automatic speed.
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Nautilus Studios
The author | Mayanin
Image | Interviewee Oriental IC
Edit | Amy