Allison Transmission, a leading manufacturer of automatic transmissions, has announced delivery of its 1000th bus transmission in India. The company has been supplying automatic transmissions to all major Indian bus manufacturers, including Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland and JCBL. Having established its presence in the bus segment, the company is now looking to expand its presence in the truck segment, particularly in mining and construction applications.
Mr. Ram Amarnath, Managing Director, Allison Transmision India Ltd., says: “The bus initiative that we started in early 2006 is beginning to gain traction, and as we continue to build on this business we want to make the next big push for the commercial trucks, wherein we are targeting the mining and construction segment”.
Allison’s association with India goes back more than 40 years when it began serving the country’s mining and oil field industries. Today, nearly 6,000 to 8,000 off-road equipments fitted with Allison Transmission are in operation in various mining sites and oil rigs across India, says Mr. Mike Headley, Vice President, International – Marketing, Sales and Service, Allison Transmission Inc.
With the truck industry in India moving towards more heavy duty applications, the company is looking for opportunities in on-highway applications as well. Allison is looking at offering solutions for concrete mixers trucks, crane carriers and heavy duty dump trucks.
In recent years, Allison Transmission’s growth in India has been propelled by fitting automatics into low-floor CNG and diesel buses in Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Nagpur and other Indian cities. It all started in 2007 with the landmark DTC order for 650, which was the first step towards mass modernisation of buses in Indian cities. All these buses were fitted with automatic transmission supplied by Allison.
DTC has placed a further order for 2,500 low-floor city buses with Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland, and all these vehicles will be fitted with Allison automatic transmissions.
The JNNURM order for 15,000 buses has further helped increase the presence of Allison Transmission in cities across India. Almost 20 per cent of these buses are of low-floor, while a good percentage of them will have automatic transmission. Today, Allison’s automatic transmission fitted buses are plying in several Indian cities.
Based on its success in the Indian market, Allison has taken a major step towards setting up of a manufacturing facility in India. The company broke ground for its new Indian facility, in Chennai, during the start of 2009.
Allison has also set up a customisation centre in Chennai, wherein the company imports transmission from US and Hungary and customise it to suit the requirement of Indian OEMs. Allison has developed some local suppliers for support parts which go with an automatic transmission. The company is also in the process of making a final decision on setting up a parts distribution warehouse, says Mr. Ram Amarnath.
