Allison Transmission, the world’s largest manufacturer of fully automatic commercial-duty transmissions, has been specified by Van Hool for its TX range of coaches. The first vehicle equipped with Allison’s T525R transmission is a TX17 Altano 3-axle 13.20-meter coach powered by a PACCAR MX13-375/510hp engine for Belgian coach travel operator, De Zigeuner. A TX17 coach was available for test drives at Busworld 2015.
While Allison has been Van Hool’s standard choice for exports to North America for decades, the TX17 is the first Van Hool coach equipped with an Allison transmission available for the European market. At Busworld, Allison displayed its recently expanded fully automatic transmission ranges for the first time in Europe.
New xFE models for buses, “xFE” designating extra fuel economy, incorporate the latest advances in fuel-efficient technology, demonstrating improvements of up to 7 per cent, in addition to potential FuelSense gains. Incorporating optimized gear ratios coupled with the FuelSense Max package, xFE transmissions have been designed to enable 1st range lock-up, deliver significantly more lock-up operation and operate at lower engine speeds in higher ranges for further fuel economy improvements. Allison offered three new xFE models in Europe: the T3280 xFE, T3325 xFE and T3375 xFE.
Allison Transmission recently realigned its Torqmatic product portfolio to include additional transmission models, each reflecting hardware and software developments that offer fleets increased fuel efficiency. The newly introduced T1000, T2100 and T2200 fully automatic transmission models replace the existing 1000, 2100 and 2200 models available for mini-bus, midi-bus and coach applications across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Australia and Latin America. The expansion of the Torqmatic product family provides customers with a complete range of Allison transmissions featuring the latest product enhancements, including 5th Generation Electronic Controls and FuelSense fuel-efficiency software. Allison displayed the T2100 transmission at Busworld.
Completing the transmission line-up on the Allison stand was an H 50 EP system. Since 2003, Allison has delivered over 6,900 hybrid propulsion systems which have accumulated nearly 1.1 billion kilometers (682 million miles), saving an estimated 137 million litres (36 million gallons) of fuel and preventing almost 360 metric tons of carbondioxide from entering the atmosphere. Allison Hybrid EP systems have demonstrated real, bottom-line operating benefits to municipalities and fleet operators in many European cities, including Duesseldorf, Hannover and Oslo.