Allison Transmission, the world’s largest manufacturer of fully-automatic transmissions for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles and hybrid-propulsion systems for city buses, is continuing its sustained efforts in the Indian market to educate OEMs and end customers on the superior value proposition offered by automatics over the more commonly used manual transmission (MT) and automated manual transmissions (AMT) options.
Allison made its presence felt at the recently-held EXCON exhibition in Bangalore by effectively communicating the benefits and advantages of automatics for a number of applications in the mining and construction sector. The company expects the Government’s infrastructure drive to fuel growth in the construction and mining segments in the coming year and considers itself well-positioned to be part of the growth.
Says Mr. Salil Gupta, Director – India Commercial Operations, Allison Transmission: “The market is very promising at present with the mining and infrastructure sector coming up very well. We see a lot of investments being made, plenty of opportunities for growth and promise from the end-users and the OEMs. The market is driving towards better efficiency and productivity, and that is where we come in in a big way. Our products, when configured into a truck, improve the efficiency and productivity significantly, which is where customers will see a big difference”.
As if indicating that the future of the mining and construction sector is likely to include automatic transmissions as a major component, Allison automatics were equipped on three new products showcased at EXCON – Tata PRIMA 3138.K 32 Cu m. Coal Tipper and MAN 49.300 prime mover – with a tip-trailer application and a Grove crane used for all-terrain heavy duty applications.
While automatics have been successful in dump truck applications in India for nearly four decades, the task on hand for Allison would be to replicate the success in high-end tippers which are typically used for overburden removal in deep-mining applications.
“Allison transmissions have been in use in India in dump trucks like BEML for over 40 years, and there are more than 10,000 dump trucks operating in different mining sites in the country. The other OEMs like CAT and Komatsu also use automatic transmissions. Hence the technology that we’re offering is not new to the mining industry. The next step for us will be to take the technology from dump trucks to heavy-duty tippers, a segment which currently uses either manual transmission or AMT. With the growing importance of efficiency and productivity, we are confident that customers would understand and embrace fully automatic solutions in the near future”, Mr. Gupta adds.