9 and 10-Speed Gearbox Coming From Ford and General Motors JV

Ford and General Motors have just announced that they signed an agreement under which both companies will jointly develop an all-new generation of advanced-technology nine- and 10-speed automatic transmissions. The transmissions will be used on cars, crossovers, SUVs and trucks. Moreover, the manufacturers will built the transmissions in both front- and rear-wheel-drive variants and as expected, these will improve vehicle performance and increase fuel economy. For those who don’t know, this is the third time in the past decade when GM and Ford collaborate on transmissions. The manufacturers delivered third time in the past decade. Ford uses the six-speed transmissions in some of America’s favorite vehicles such as the Fusion, Edge, Escape and Explorer, while GM installs them on the six-speed transmissions in some of America’s favorite vehicles.
“Engineering teams from GM and Ford have already started initial design work on these new transmissions,” said Jim Lanzon, GM vice president of global transmission engineering. “We expect these new transmissions to raise the standard of technology, performance and quality for our customers while helping drive fuel economy improvements into both companies’ future product portfolios.”
“The goal is to keep hardware identical in the Ford and GM transmissions. This will maximize parts commonality and give both companies economy of scale,” said Craig Renneker, Ford’s chief engineer for transmission and driveline component and pre-program engineering. “However, we will each use our own control softwareto ensure that each transmission is carefully matched to the individual brand-specific vehicle DNA for each company.”