China Car Times

In November last year, Geely signed a deal with Antonov to supply six speed automatic gear boxes to Geely for use in future cars. At the time, the deal went unnoticed and thus flew under many motoring websites radar. Antonov released a small (as in tiny) press release which said:

The board of Antonov plc, the automotive technology company, is very pleased to announce that it has signed heads of agreement for a production licence with Zhejiang Geely Automobile Gearbox Co; the transmission manufacturing subsidiary of Geely Automotive, one of China’s leading vehicle manufacturers. The licence would be for the production of the company’s TX6 six-speed automatic transmission.

Antonovs TX6 speed transmission is allegedly one of the best, and the cheapest automatic transmissions on the market at the moment, obviously, such technology will put Geely head and shoulders above the rest of the rising Chinese car makers who are for the most part, still playing around with Mitsubishi supplied gearboxes and engines. Only a few of the Chinese car makers have started to develop their own engines (Chery, Geely, Brilliance to name a few) the rest rely on either Mitsubishi or Toyota for their under the hood needs (this gives them a huge selling point though) We are told that at the moment there are no domestic Chinese manufacturers of automatic transmissions, Geely has had some limited success and has gotten as far as making 3 speed boxes, but the TX6 seems to be a massive upgrade for Geely.
Regular China Car Times commenter, Warren, sent us these videos of Antonov supercharges and gearboxes being used in other vehicles.

It seems Antonov has a large (and growing) fan site