Ford and GM to co-develop 9 A/T and 10 A/T

Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corporation have signed an agreement to jointly develop a new range of nine- and ten-speed automatic transmissions for a wide range of applications encompassing trucks, passenger cars, crossovers, and SUVs, and available for both front- and rear-wheel drive variants.

In a statement released by Ford, it is said that ‘the collaboration enables both automakers to design, develop, engineer, test, validate and deliver these new transmissions for their vehicles faster and at lower cost than if each company worked independently’.

Preliminary work has already begun between the engineering teams of both companies and this project marks the third collaboration between the two rival car makers in transmission development. The six-speed automatic transmissions currently used by the Chevrolet Cruze and Orlando is the product of an earlier collaboration between the two car makers, and there are now 8 million of these transmissions running worldwide.

That original collaboration served as a template for the new one, with each company will manufacturing its own transmissions in its own plants with many common components.

“The goal is to keep hardware identical in the Ford and GM transmissions. This will maximize parts commonality and give both companies economy of scale,” said Craig Renneker, Ford’s chief engineer for transmission and driveline component and pre-program engineering.

“However, we will each use our own control softwareto ensure that each transmission is carefully matched to the individual brand-specific vehicle DNA for each company,” Renneker continued.

“By jointly sharing the development of these two new families of transmissions, both GM and Ford will be able to more efficiently use our respective manpower resources to develop additional future advanced transmissions and bring them to market faster than if we worked alone,” said Jim Lanzon, GM vice president of global transmission engineering.

KON