TEHRAN – Iran’s top automaker, Iran Khodro Company (IKCO), has unveiled the country’s first domestically designed six-speed manual gearbox, IRIB reported.

The gearbox was unveiled during a ceremony on Saturday with Iran’s deputy industry, mining, and trade minister for industry affairs and IKCO Managing Director Farshad Moqimi in attendance.

According to Moqimi, the technology for building the mentioned gearbox has been fully indigenized and the gearbox will be mass-produced within the second half of the next Iranian calendar year (March 20-September 21, 2020).

“By the end of the next Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2021) over 10,000 vehicles will be equipped with the mentioned gearbox,” Moqimi said.

Increasing the Iranian engineers' and designers’ capability in designing and manufacturing gearboxes, improving drivability, improving gearbox quality, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing after-sales service costs are mentioned to be some of the benefits of the production of such gearboxes.

Using the new six-speed gearboxes is going to reduce the automobiles’ fuel consumption by at least 1.5 percent comparing to the current five-speed gearboxes, the official said.

IKCO is also going to produce automatic six-speed gearboxes in the Q4 of the next Iranian calendar year.

According to the IKCO head, 60 percent of the knowledge and equipment used in the automatic gearboxes will be domestic.

“By the end of the next year 1000 automatic six-speed gearboxes will be produced and installed on various vehicles,” Moqimi said.

According to the official, Marketing studies show that at least 100,000 manual and automatic gearboxes are needed each year in the Iranian market, and Iran Khodro has considered this demand in its product development roadmap.

EF/MA