Chongqing Qingshan Industry Co., a Chinese company mainly supplying manual transmissions for minivans, will start producing manual transmissions that shift automatically for sedans in mid-March.

The new transmissions will mainly target domestic Chinese automakers and will be first supplied to Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Co., says a marketing manager from Qingshan, who declined to be identified.

The transmissions use sensors, processors and actuators to shift gears automatically.

The manager says the actuating units used in Qingshan's new transmissions will be powered by electric motors. He adds the company fully owns the patent rights of the product, but declines to say whether it contains key components sourced from global suppliers.

The new transmissions can only be fitted to 1.3 liter engines at present, but the company plans to develop more new products for engines of other sizes in the coming few years, the manager says.

"Since we have the actuating units, it is not difficult to apply the system to many other sizes of manual transmissions we are producing now," he says.

The marketing manager from Qingshan says the production volume of automated manual transmissions will be modest in the near future because the transmissions will only be supplied to Jianghuai's Tongyue subcompact car.

Jianghuai sold 3,300 Tongyue units in January, according to Automotive Resources Asia, a unit of J.D. Power and Associates. The car is now fitted with a manual transmission.

The manager says Qingshan produced about 930,000 manual transmissions in 2008, mainly for two leading minivan makers in China, SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co. and Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. SAIC-GM-Wuling is 34 percent owned by General Motors.

The company also supplies bigger size manual transmissions for other domestic Chinese automakers such as Chery Automobile Co. and FAW Haima Automobile Co.