Allison Transmission is moving towards greater customization of its automatic transmission products across a variety of trucking niches to help fleet owners better match transmission specs with their intended application.
“We’re going to deliver a more tightly spec’d product to the customer to fit their specific operating conditions,” Mitch Murray, Allison’s manager of North American product development, told Fleet Owner.
“We’re talking about having much tighter performance calibrations so we have much greater odds for success, and that the specs a customer orders for a particular truck will match the type of work it’s expected to perform under a variety of conditions,” he said.
Allison is focusing more closely on transmission fluid research, of which its new synthetic TranSyn product represents a recent breakthrough, he added.
“It’s an overused term, but we’re really taking a more ‘holistic’ approach to designing transmissions now – and that includes the fluid,” Murray said. “What we’re trying to do is transition from the wear and tear on components to wear and tear on the transmission fluid and filter. Having fluids like TranSyn that don’t shear down and oxidize helps us make that transition, and so give fleets much better life cycle costs where their transmission are concerned.”
