“CVT” or safely can be uttered as “automatic gearbox”, is the trend catching up the Indian market with every possible grim in various segments. Though for some it maybe a choice of the kind of fairer sex, where true men loves to live on the edge with changing gears and other such adjoining technicalities. However, still managing to gain enough attention for the markets like India, CVT and automatics are in great demand with continuously engraved fact of it usurping more petrol than the manual one.
Right at the moment, Nissan is focussing its efforts on developing an Automated Manual Transmission (AMT) gearbox for its more affordable models in India. It’s the ‘X-tronic’ CVT gearbox deployed on the automatic variants of Micra and Sunny in India. Developed and produced by gearbox maker JATCO, a subsidiary of Nissan, the X-Tronic is one of the best CVT gearboxes around.
However, the Maruti’s new AMT gearbox on Celerio is giving an enormous blow to the Nissan and also to its plan for making the Japanese engineering affordable for the Indian buyers over the local brand. “We will take one of our existing manual gearboxes and develop an AMT module for it. This is an easy task and will be economically more viable,” said Takashi Hata, Senior Vice President, responsible for India amongst other markets. The new yet affordable guise of gears will not be sourced from the JATCO confirmed Nissan.
It will safe enough to pronounce that Nissan Sunny and Micra will be the models to bear witness to this new automatic option in the lineup. It also cannot be chalked off that Nissan’s budget brand Datsun may too get the same AMT treatment with hatchback Datsun Go, the MPV Go+ and the Redi Go in the future.
Courtesy: Autocar