The company has already made its I-Shift AMT standard on the company’s trucks, and market penetration of Volvo’s flagship gearbox hit 88.8 percent as of May.
Magnus Koeck, Volvo Trucks’ vice president, marketing and brand management, says now that 94.5 percent of Volvo trucks are spec’d with Volvo engines, even bigger things lie ahead for I-Shift and AMTs in general.
“I bet in five years you won’t see a manual [transmission] anymore,” he says.
The company believes so heavily in the future of shiftless driving that it is targeting growth opportunity in heavy haul and vocational segments by including optional crawler gears in 13 and 14 speed I-Shifts.
“We just weren’t able to go slow enough (before),” Wade Long, Volvo Trucks’ director of product marketing, says of unlocking concrete and paving operation customers, for example.
