DCT Share To Triple By 2015
The next five years will see a sharp change in car buyers' preferences when it comes to transmission choice, with a migration away from conventional manual and automatic gearboxes towards more efficient transmission types.
Those are the conclusions presented by transmission experts Scott Halley and Susie Hurley to an automotive transmissions conference in Detroit last month. Halley and Hurley, researchers at leading lubricant additives manufacturer Lubrizol, identify the need to improve fuel efficiency, lower CO2 emissions and improve performance and comfort as the main drivers influencing future transmission choice; packaging and manufacturing synergies will also in their view become important.
Drawing together the results of multiple external reports, the two experts conclude that the major beneficiary of the new focus on CO2 and efficiency will be the dual clutch transmission: fitted to fewer than one in 100 cars produced in 2005, DCTs are already on track to appear on four out of every 100 cars globally next year. The experts' most startling conclusion, however, is that the acceleration in DCT take-up will gather even greater pace as the new decade unwinds: by 2015, ten percent of all passenger cars produced globally will be fitted with a dual clutch transmission.
Halley and Hurley also forecast a slight rise in the take-up of CVT transmissions as well as AMTs (Automated Manual Transmission).
The big losers in the rush for efficiency are likely to be the transmission types we are most familiar with today, say the Lubrizol specialists. Standard manual gearboxes will see their market share fall from 50 percent in 2005 to 43 percent by 2015, while for torque converter automatics the drop will be even steeper - from 46 percent in 2005 to 37 percent a decade later.
Halley and Hurley's global market share estimates paint a significantly more bullish future picture for DCT than the predictions from other forecasters. Consultancy I H S Global insight last month [http://www.dctfacts.com/hmStory5a.asp] gave DCTfacts.com its forecasts of DCT share in global vehicle production, calculating a 5.15 percent share by 2015; for Europe, however, Global Insight calculated a penetration rate of 13.56 percent.
In December last year we reported Timothy Manganello, (CEO of BorgWarner, which supplied the first-ever commercially available DCT system for the Volkswagen Golf in 2003), predicting DCT sales of 5 million units by 2013, equating to a global share of between 5.5 and 7 percent.
The new emphasis on dual clutch transmissions will bring with it a new set of challenges for lubricant engineers, say the Lubrizol specialists. New and very clever additive formulations will be required to strike a balance between the friction required for the DCT's clutches and the durability required for the gears. Yet, say Halley and Hurley, the low-viscosity lubricants necessary to achieve efficiency will have to maintain all their protective qualities and durability at extremes of temperature and load.
Among the areas identified for special attention are the clutches and synchronizers, where the low-temperature viscometrics of the DCT fluid are especially important.
Story Filed: 7/14/2009
By Tony Lewin, managing editor DCTfacts.com