At this year's Beijing Auto Show, no one paid attention to what kind of technology was used in fuel vehicles.
If it was at the last Beijing Auto Show, a large number of media and consumers would be concerned about what engine this car used, how large the displacement, whose gearbox, how many gears, and whether it was frustrated.
In the era of electrification, some people still care about the engine, because it is the ballast stone of hybrid development, and a good hybrid system must have a good enough engine.
The engine and gearbox have always been the CP of perfect development.
Unfortunately, in the hybrid technology route, the gearbox is no longer needed, and instead is replaced by a simple gear shift mechanism, and even in the range extender architecture, even the gear shift mechanism is not needed.
Traditional transmission giants, ZF and Aisin's business in China has declined significantly.
At this year's Beijing Auto Show, because a large number of electrified products landed on the market, the fuel vehicles of joint venture car companies have basically entered a "stagnation period", and many brands have released their own electrification products.
This is true of brands such as Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, etc.
The development direction of pure electric vehicles is speed, technology, comfort and configuration, the development direction of PHEV is endurance, safety and price, and the advantages of REEV are more obvious, fuel consumption, high-end and intelligence.
In the first half of April, the passenger association released data that the penetration rate of electrification reached 50%, which means that half of the products in the market have begun to abandon the gearbox, and these products do not need any shift mechanism.
MT manual transmission, AT transmission, CVT continuously variable transmission, DCT dual-clutch transmission, have all been eliminated by the market.
Another obvious feature here is that the transformation speed of Chinese brands is very fast, and the penetration rate of the entire market is much higher than 50%, while the electrification penetration rate of foreign brands is quite weak.
That is to say, the sense of identity and expectation of traditional gearboxes, autonomy and foreign capital are clearly torn.
A large number of independent brands can do crazy abandonment of gearboxes and only use gearboxes on a small number of fuel vehicles, such as large-displacement products such as tank series.
Foreign brands are still global fuel vehicle thinking because they are global design models and global design power architecture.
For example, Volkswagen's 1.4T and 2.0T power are the traditional transmission + engine power architecture, and the Toyota series, BBA series, and Nissan series are also based on the traditional transmission structure.
However, from the perspective of the domestic market, the transmission business of Aisin and ZF has declined significantly.
Losing the domestic market means losing a huge cake, and the timeline is pulled back to ten years ago, and domestic car companies are still pleading with foreign-funded companies, begging them to provide more gearboxes.
This is also the significance of the development of electrification, with a new track to break the traditional technical barriers, so that the development of our products at least will no longer be subject to external constraints, can achieve stable development.
In the next few years, the development of electrification in China and even the world will be faster, the proportion of sales of traditional models will be less and less, and the entire transmission market will continue to shrink.
In the shrinking market in the future, transmission companies may release mainstream technologies in advance to fight against the growing electrification market, one is to delay the speed of their own decline, and the other is to make their own research and development in exchange for market profits.