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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

ZF8 seems to be used by Audi only for cars sold in America?

btw. ZF means Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen. Which is owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. Which was founded to support the built of Zeppelin Luftschiffe and social purposes. Weird story. And the Zeppelin Foundation was for a long time owner of Cherry. The company behind most mechanical keyboard switches. They should've kept that, growing business area - mechanical switches ;)

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It's been used by numerous manufacturers in addition to Audi, including BMW and seemingly every FCA/Stellantis brand. I've driven a BMW 5 series fitted with one and I can confirm it's a great transmission that is smooth and capable during normal driving, but has reasonable sportiness when required.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZF_8HP_transmission

The ZF8 is in plenty of euro Audis as well, but only the big, expensive stuff since it's a longitudinal gearbox. The more common, smaller Audis would be on the MQB transverse platform that can't use the ZF8. And Audi has been using a dual clutch on some of their lower-end MLB cars.

Anything A6/Q7 and up is a ZF8 if it's an automatic.

Now would not be a great time to be in that area when "knockoff" switches have pretty much out-innovated Cherry into irrelevance

But that aside, as other comments point out the ZF8 is not Audi specific, Plenty of non-M car BMWs use it, and even heavy duty pick up trucks are running with ZF8s now

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