Land Rover will showcase a first of its kind 9-speed automatic gearbox at Geneva Motor Show this year, and also the first one to be embedded on road-legal passenger car.
Getting his hands strongly on the off road grudger now Land Rover is a bit on the sharper-side by launching its new invention in market for gaining more out of the brand tagging. New transmission is named as ‘9HP’ and being made by partnering with ZF who is a leader in that industry. Shift-system is claimed to be smooth and at the same time ‘efficient’ as well. 9HP does also tend to reduce carbon imprints created by vehicles on our environment.
Innovating this one wasn’t an easy task, as concluded that while making downshifts driver can make request to the system for directly swapping at the lowest one if travelling in a fast lane. A fast-off mode scans the request of driver and tallies it with number of throttles to make right decision – either to shift or to hold on with same. The ZF masterpiece too grasps driver’s mood in seconds and does the task as per that itself, like “Curve Mode” feature, for undertaking the responsibility when to accelerate/decelerate during upshift.
In spite of being lugged with additional three, the gear ratio extends only by 0.24 inches i.e. 6mm, and weighs at 7.5 kg, a much lesser than its outgoing model. Two patented dog clutches have been vested inside it to outdo conventional clutch packs for getting well down on lowest possible weight. A compact type of hydraulic vane-type pump has also been used to get to all derivations in a perfect manner.
Lastly, the new ZF 9HP transmission will be donned with Range Rover, Land Rover LR4 and Range Rover Sport, production is meant to be carried out at ZF’s Gray Court facility in South Carolina, USA.
