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ZF Friedrichshafen AG
Innovations of Great Value
Type Public company
Founded 20 August 1915
Headquarters Friedrichshafen, Germany
Key people Hans-Georg Härter (CEO)
Industry Automotive
Products Automotive
Revenue (turnover) 12.6 Billion Euros (2007) (US$ 18.9 Billion)
Employees 57,500 (2007)
Website ZF.com

The ZF Friedrichshafen AG or as normally called in the UK just ZF are a leading worldwide supplier of driveline and chassis technology. With 119 production locations in 26 countries, ZF provides components and systems to the automotive, commercial vehicle, off-highway/construction, marine, rail, elevator, machine tool, automation and aviation industries.

Products[]

ZF products include automatic and manual transmissions for cars, trucks, buses and construction equipment; chassis components (ball joints, tie rods, cross-axis joints, stabilizer bars, control arms); shocks and struts; electronic damping systems including Continuous Damping Control (CDC), Active Roll Stabilization (ARS); clutches; torque converters; axle drives; and industrial drives (gearboxes).

Through the ZF Lenksysteme Division (a 50-50 joint venture between ZF and Bosch), steering components and systems are produced, including steering columns, gears and pumps; Electric Power Steering (EPS); and Active Steering.

With the rise in popularity of the semi-automatic transmission in trucks and buses, ZF introduced the ZF-AS Tronic.

The company is also known for its manual and automatic truck and bus transmissions. ZF transmissions are the ones used most commonly in buses. Among the most popular products for buses is the automatic Ecomat transmission range which was introduced in 1980.

ZF Lemförder, ZF Sachs, and Boge are all divisions/business units of ZF specializing in original equipment and aftermarket solutions for the automotive industry.


History[]

The company was founded in 1915 in Friedrichshafen, Germany to produce gears for zeppelins and other airships but moved into the automobile market by 1918.

In the 1960s, the company began supplying transmissions to the major German automakers, including DKW and BMW, as well as Peugeot and Alfa Romeo. A popular automatic transmission (the 3 HP 20) was introduced in 1969 which was designed to be an easy swap with the company's manual transmissions. Worldwide subsidiaries and factories were opened in the 1970s, and the company moved into India, South Korea, and became a major supplier to Ford in the 1980s. The company expanded into China in the 1990s.

In 2001, ZF introduced the world's first six-speed automatic transmission for passenger cars in the BMW 7 Series. Today, ZF produces around 1 million six-speed automatic transmissions annually.

Overseas facilities[]

  • ZF has a re-manufacturing facility and customer support operation in Nottingham, England, to service OEMs like JCB, Terex, Jaguar and fleet users with gearboxes and axles used in truck and buses, as well as large off road machinery such as dump trucks. [1]
  • ZF Group North American Operations is headquartered in Northville, Michigan.
  • ZF Group Asia Pacific Operations is head-quartered in Shanghai, PR China.

Applications[]

ZF Gearboxes & Axles are used in;

See also[]

References[]

External links[]



Smallwikipedialogo This page uses some content from Wikipedia. The original article was at ZF. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Tractor & Construction Plant Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons by Attribution License and/or GNU Free Documentation License. Please check page history for when the original article was copied to Wikia


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