What was the first car to NOT have a manual transmission as an option?
 

I know what many consider the first full automatic transmission the hydramatic came out in 1940 models. I also know that when the front wheel drive olds Toronado came out in 1966 the automatic transmission was so popular that GM didn't bother to make a manual to fit the unique drive train of the Unitized Power Package... From what I've read my Lincoln Mark V didn't have a manual option either.

What I wonder is what model and year car was first to not offer the option of a manual.

Im unsure of the answer but will add a little that a lot of people dont know. A common tactic with the car and truck plants... if manual transmissions were more popular they seemed to make auto's standard and charge more for manuals. If Auto's were more popular they came with manuals and charge more for autos. Pretty sneaky.

Im betting your answer will be some obscure maker, or AMC. They would have secured their tranny's from a single source and would have only ordered 1 type of tranny to save cost. I could be wrong though.

Cadillac?

Could you order a stick on the 3rd Gen Caprice? Those came out in 77. I'd think other large cars from Cadillac / Lincoln were never offered with a stick.

According to Wikipedia from '58 on the Continental only had an automatic. And the Cadillac Series 62 from '54 only had an automatic.

Right now we own 2 cars with no transmission :nerd: (just a single reduction gear)

-J

I believe the last Cadillac to offer a manual transmission would have been a 52 or 53. I'm nearly certain they all had autos by 55.

I think the last full size Chevy (Biscayne - Bel Air - Impala - Caprice) to have a manual was probably around 73, certainly the last of the manuals would have been in the 71-74 era (and this probably would have been some rare stripped down 3-speed column shift model, I don't think they put 4-speeds in after 1970 or maybe even 69 - I've never seen one with a 4-speed newer than 68). I don't think they made any 75-76s with manuals at all.

Full size Buicks only offered a 4-speed from 63-65, but the 3-speed manual continued as a rare option into the early 70s.

Oldsmobile seems to have made a few full size 4-speed cars in 65-66, and also continues the 3 on the tree as a rare option into the early 70s.

Pontiac offered 4-speeds in their big cars as early as 1960, but probably discontinued them in '68 (I've never even seen a picture of one newer than 68 with the 4-speed). I think here also the column shift 3-speed continued as a rare option until at least '71.

If I could go back in time and special order any car I wanted, I'd be a 60 Buick Invicta 2 door hardtop with the 401 nailhead and a 3-on the tree (I think the only 60 Buicks they really made with the 3-speed were base model Le Sabres with the 364 - 2 barrel engine). Actually, I'd love to find any of the 59-60 GM full size cars, especially one with the 3-speed.

The Toronado was a "personal luxury" car so autos would be
ordered near 100%. Also making it work would cost to much.
The turbo 400 in them actually runs backwards ! Even the
much loved GMC camper w/ Toro driveline was auto only.
I also had a 1970 Delta 88. Standard was an extra cost option.
That would have been a screamer with a 4 spead & the 455 cid.
Any big car with a standard is a RARE bird indeed !

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

The last Caddy you could get w/a 3 speed was the 1953 Fleetwood 75 limo. They also made a "Business Sedan version", that was just like the limo except w/heavier duty. & slightly downgraded interior appointments-Think fancy taxi,& You'll get the idea. I think they offered a manual in their commercial chassis later on as well, but I don't know about that. By '55, the Hydramatic had been out 15 yrs or so, & had pretty well proved its worth in virtually all applications.

Sorry to get off topic, but have you seen the WeberAuto youtube channel? Excellent information about automatic transmission design and theory!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oWFTOY-3tY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygkRuwCpKxU

-J

Thaks for the WeberAuto link - looks so interesting, I have subscribed and will be working my way through some of the vids.

I'm not 100% positive on this, but I do believe that starting for the 1951 model year, you could only purchase a Packard Patrician 400 with the Ultramatic transmission, and that the "delete for credit" option was pulled. That would be earlier than the Cadillacs by a year or two.

^ this. Pretty sure it was a Packard in the early 50s. If not, I'd wager perhaps an Imperial of the same era.

Are the cars you have no with no transmission considered to be a CVT transmission?

Always wanted to see a Dutch DAF-They had maybe the 1st CVT type transmission. They didn't sell their cars here in America, we're notoriously Tough" on stuff-Ask Fiat & Renault about that. BTW, I found a decrepit 4CV Renault in a junkyard once...Front "Suicide" doors, rear opened normally-Raised the hood-Surprise ! Motor was in the rear. Looked up, right between my hands, holding the lid up, was the biggest Wasper Nest God ever made, & they were NOT Happy Campers about being disturbed. Slammed the hood, Bonnet" lid, whatever, turned tail & hauled arse. Guess I made God laugh, He didn't let His very angry Waspers sting me even once. And they were them mean, teeny-tiny l'il striped sonsa bitches. I dunno if youse guys have that variety where YOU live, but even tho most ALL Waspers are basically mean Arsewholes, these are a special breed that make the rest look like Sunday School teachers... They truly "Take NO Prisoners...(grin)

Nope, single speed reduction gear, the electric motor is hooked up to a single reduction gear, which is connected to the differential. Nothing to shift, nothing to engage. This is how our Fiat 500e and Tesla Model 3 are set up. Some call this a single speed automatic but I think with nothing to shift it's not really a transmission.

Our Cadillac ELR does have an e-CVT, the 4ET50. There are 2 electric motors that are different inputs to the planetary gearset, plus a couple clutches. I attached a cutaway picture. WeberAuto goes into great detail about this system.

-J

I figured it would be a luxury car, but I'm amazed it was that early... I kinda wondered if Packard had lasted long enough to offer automatics.

I'm sure they went the route that Studebaker did. Sourced their transmissions from Borg-Warner or some similar named company.

Packard: Ultramatic

Studebaker: Flight-O-Matic

First car in high school was a 1966 Studebaker Cruiser with auto. Shift quadrant was, PNDLR.

The dealer was still in business and the head mechanic told me they were "Ford" transmissions...

Model T Fords had a sort of type of automatic. Well, not really-you'd step on one pedal, the tin Lizzie would be in "Low", stomp on the other pedal, you'd get a mournful howl from the tranny that would tell you that you were in high, & was good all the way up to a heady 50 MPH or so. The tranny operated w/bands, they were ALWAYS worn out, even from virtually brand-new, to equalize wear, a T driver became a virtuoso in driving backwards. A T tranny had a very rudimentary sort-of version of a modern planetary auto gear box, the 1927 Model A used a "Modern 3 speed" sliding gear box that is basically similar to what is used today on many vehicles. Everything old is New again...

There's only my friend Roy, my Wife's friend Sue & myself who have an auto, everyone else I know has a manual shift. Automatics are quite rare here in England & some cars don't have an option of an auto box. I've had an auto since 2010 & won't go back to a manual, I love it when I'm in stop/start traffic not having to keep pressing a clutch every few seconds, my left leg would be aching when I came home from work, not any more though...

It is the opposite here in the states...The last manual in the family was gone before my parents married (maybe even before they met). It wasn't till after college that I knew anyone with a manual or even sat in a car with one.

We Muricans love our automatics.:thmbsp: Heck, we're lazy enough that it is hard to find a car without a cruise control...And a friend swears by and was trying to sell me on Chevys adaptive cruise control...Though I don't do enough regular highway driving for the adaptive feature to make a difference.

Mostly automatics here in Canada too, but I don't care for them at all. It stands to reason though, most of those drivers need to keep a hand free for texting.

Big rig truck drivers who insist on an automatic, a.k.a. a steering wheel holders, shouldn't be driving trucks at all in my opinion. Truckers worth their salt probably get to the point where using a clutch all day doesn't bother their left leg at all. Use it or lose it I say.

That's about as macho as I ever get, take it or leave it. :smoke:

I had a 1961 Cadillac that had PNDLR and then a 1964 that had the normal PRNDL , so for Cadillac the changeover must have been 1962 or 1963 . the 61 had what they called a "Dual Coupling Hydramatic" whereas the 64 had the "Turbo Hydramatic 400" .

When I bought my first car 55 years ago, I couldn't afford the extra money that an auto transmission cost. The first 7 years of driving, was nothing but manual. When I did get an automatic, driving it, I thought, this is pretty nice, especially in heavy city traffic.
When I bought my 2006 Jeep Wrangler, I thought it should be a manual like the original Jeep.

There's the main benefit of an automatic, getting through gridlocks with ease. The road network where I am is known to be poorly designed, so there are more here than in real cities. I've heard of bus drivers saying that's why they can't keep on schedule.

I know a fellow with two Smart ForTwos with the automated manual, something I hadn't even heard of until I actually rode in one of them a few weeks ago. He goes through the gears manually, and I can feel the rumble from the electric clutch engaging. The system is fairly interesting although still not my bag of toys. The one he's using now, I think he just uses it when the other is is awaiting significant repairs.

Is the shift pattern reversed on the manual gear boxes? I know you have to shift with your left hand. I would imagine first and second would be closest to the driver. Also, how many speeds are the manuals.
Dave.

I guess you have to own two of them, one to drive and one to repair. :D
My 2017 Jeep Compass has a transmission similar to that, but I just drive it as an automatic.

Packard developing their own automatic was considered quite a feat at the time, as even mighty Generous Motors hadn't come out w/Hydramatic til '38,& I think they were kinda troublesome til the late '40s-early '50s. Ford introduced their semi-auto, Liquamatic Drive, in '41, but only in Mercurys & Lincolns. It was so awful that it did not make it past '42, & IIRC, most were replaced w/std 3/4 speeds. It is not known if any survived to the present day. Ford swallowed their pride & bought Hydramatics from GM til their own auto boxes came out in '51. Automatics, power steering, power brakes, it all came together in the early Fifties. No longer did you have to be an exceptionally big, strong man to drive a car. Any 5' 2" mother of3 squalling brats could wheel a big station wagon full of said squalling brats, plus several puppies, & do her daily chores-Including taking the pups to the vet's to get their shots, as well as the biggest, burliest man could. Of course now, even inferring that a woman is in any way can't do anything any man can do will likely start a pretty decent cuss fight, but 1949 America was a bit different.Lots of older women when I was a kid didn't drive, they didn't want to, or they were scared of cars, or somesuch. Neither one of my grannies drove, one never had & the other stopped when she moved in w/us when I was born.

My uncle bought a brand-new '40 Oldsmobile with the Hydramatic. The transmission failed about two years later. It was during the war and parts were unavailable. They dealer had to convert it back to a manual so it could be driven. Naturally he was really POed.

Somewhere in the back of my feeble little mind, I seem to recall that the same man held patents on both Hydramatic & Chrysler's Torqueflite, which came out postwar, IIRC.Having the benefit of a bit more development, Torqueflite avoided Hydramatic's early teething troubles, & even Uncle Tom McCahill called Torqueflite the best tranny in the business. Read Uncle Tom RELIGIOUSLY when a budding Idiot Savant back in grade school- Learnt a LOT from him. Almost every one of his articles were loaded w/amazing nuggets of info that you couldn't readily find elsewhere & he had a very fresh witty writing style that a lot of today's scribes would do well to emulate. And I take back the "Idiot Savant" quip-Welll, the "Savant" part, anhoo.... The "Idiot" part ? Well, as most of you lot can attest to-There's NO DOUBT whatsoever about THAT...In no way, shape, or form...

IIRC, what killed the original Hydramatic was the fact that there was one shift in it, I think 2-3, that had to actuate and release a whole bunch of clutches and stuff with the correct timing, and it was tricky for them to do. The Torqueflite and later stuff were 3 speeds, where every gear change was just a clutch or a band or two.

A lot of companies did weird stuff back then with automatics, probably to get around patents.

The common until now PRNDL was mandated by the feds with pushing from Nader, who seemed to think PNDLR was the source of all the world's problems (and console shifters - he wanted a ban on them, IIRC from his book). If course, I'm sure if the US auto industry at the time was already PRNDL, he'd have argued against it for something else.

Of course now that he crawled into whatever hole he came out of, cars have all sorts of bizzare shifters that 1/2 the world can't figure out...

I THNK the Hydramatic was always a 3 speed, but the Powerglide & Fordamatic, which both appeared in '51 were 2 speed boxes. They were supposedly simplified designs to be cheaper to produce, being they went into GM & Fords' cheapest cars, but they were inefficient as hell. Gm upped the Chevy's displacement from 216 cubic inches to 235 to give the Powerslide a little more horsepower so turtles were less likely to run away & hide from it. My parents had a '51 Chevy w/a Powerglide in it, my mom learned to drive in it. She couldn't-Or WOULDN'T learn to work a manual, they could afford little else than a Chevy. My dad told me it took til next year for it to make it to 60 MPH. You'd stomp on it, grow a beard waiting for it to hit 55 or so, it would go "BANG !!", shift into high, & then you'd eventually top out 70-75 or so. Cars-Even the legendary Ford V-8s were rather feeble appliances, at least til '55, when Chevy's equally legendary V-8 appeared. But you really didn't see the pavement-rippers until later on in the latter half of the Fifties.

In my long ago recollection I think I remember the "Dual Coupling Hydramatic" in my 61 Caddy as having been a four speed . I don't know how they did it , but I seem to recall the "Dual Coupling" referring to a second small torque converter type device behind the regular torque converter , and that may have had something to do with an extra ratio .

Edited to add ; Wikki identifies this as the "Controlled Coupling Hydramatic" and confirms it to be a four speed . I'm almost certain , however , that the car's owner's manual identified it as a "Dual Coupling Hydramatic" , I'm not sure which is correct except that I remember having 4 speeds in my 61 and only 3 speeds in my 64 , and felt the 4 speed better suited a car of that size (nice low first gear to get it moving quickly) .

GM completely re-did their "Big-Car" lines in '65. In '64, they had hydramatic in the Sixty-Two series Cads & TURBO-hydramatic in all the others. In '65, ALL the Cads had turbo-hydramatic, a new perimeter frame, a swanky new body that had all the interior dimensions increased, especially the front legroom/floor area, curved side windows, & Cad FINALLY got rid of its fins, but by '64, they were mere shadows of their former selves. My granddad had a tan '60 Sedan DeVille, it had the OMG fins, the compound curved windshield, I think "Dagmar" bumpers, it was quite literally a one-car parade cruising down the street. We were out in it once during a hailstorm, I just KNEW it was gonna bust that wacky windscreen, but, it didn't. He traded it on a '68 Sedan DeV, it was that extremely fugly color they only had THAT year-kinda gold, kinda green, kinda brown. Inside & out. The best name for it was "Babyshit Brown", that was pretty close to the most apt description anybody could think of. It looked like an overgrown Chevy Biscayne, no chrome, no sex, no nothing. I was very disappointed in that car-it was really the polar opposite of the zany '60 model.

Interesting. I always thought the Hydramatic was 4-speed.

According to the following there was a three speed version later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_Rot...c_transmission

"Roto Hydramatic (sometimes spelled Roto Hydra-Matic or Roto-Hydramatic) was an automatic transmission built by General Motors and used on some Oldsmobile and Pontiac and Holden models from 1961–1965. It was based on the earlier, four-speed Hydramatic, but was more compact, providing only three forward speeds."

The Hydramatic transmission was a joint effort between engineering at Olds, and engineering at Cadillac. All early Hydramatic transmissions were four speed, with two sets of gear ratios manufactured: one for cars, and one for GMC and Chevrolet trucks.

Nailed it. He does all the work on his family's cars and likes the Smart at least partly because it's a really cheap way to get from A to B. He fixed up a 2006 Mercedes-Benz C230 sport coupe for his daughter to use, but she decided it was too fancy for her liking so he sold it for just enough to break even. Fair enough, a car like that would make the wrong kind of statement for me as well. I'll stick with old and rather obscure.

Having driven both pre- and post-war Olds with the Hydramatic, I will say the 1-2 gear shift can be rough, and occurs a bit earlier than one would expect from say a modern transmission. It does drive and feel more like a 3 speed; one gets the impression that the first gear is there solely to get the damn thing to start coasting forward. Remember, these cars were HEAVY!

This car talk can really get crazy!
I went to a garage sale several years ago and some stuck up looking broad stopped as well, driving one of those death-traps, a so-called Smart Car. I was driving my old Toyota Prius. I remarked the my car gets at least 5 MPG more than that thing you're driving and it has a little more room in it, plus it's safer.
Naturally the bimbo mentioned the costly batteries.

They'd have a hard time selling me on one of those "smart" deathtraps as a golf cart let alone as a car.

A year or two back I remember this commercial where they tried to show the strength of the bodyshell by balancing a Suburban on top of its roof...As an engineer, I thought "okay you've shown me your ad agency is good at deceiving dumb people. Now show me what that soda can does under REAL crash conditions" There have been various cases of people balancing cars as heavy as a suburban on four chicken eggs...Just because it can take a static load don't mean it is worth a damn in an impact at highway speeds. A real demo would have been to park it nose against a concrete wall and ram a Suburban or a semi truck into it at at least 50MPH and show that the passenger compartment is fully intact...Though I'd reckon it probably takes that impact like a chicken egg (SPLAT!). :thumbsdn::D

I say a lot of things I think could be considered crazy, I just roll with it.

This makes me think of how the Ford/Chevy/Dodge 4X4 guys are always taking cheap shots at one another. They could debate the strengths and weaknesses of each indefinitely, and/or use compromising photos of the object of their derision as the basis for Pinterest memes.
Considering that I'm not a Smart enthusiast but I know a few things about them, I can take an objective stance on this.

I used to think a crash would easily turn one of those things into an Origami sculpture, but then I found out about the cage around the passenger compartment. There is a video of one slamming into a concrete barrier at 70MPH; the passenger compartment help up fairly well, save for the big hole in the driver's side footwell. The doors still opened, the damage hindering movement of the driver's door somewhat but the the other door was not affected.

I don't think any vehicle or its passengers would survive getting sandwiched by a semi moving at a good clip. Many moons ago I heard a story of a similar accident involving a 1971 Mercury Montego. If I'm not mistaken a drunk in a 5-tonne truck pushed the Merc into the wall of a bar, caving in the wall as well. The owner had recently done a bunch of bodywork on it in preparation for paint. That was in 1978 according to a photo I saw of the wreckage.

I stopped at a friend's place where he was prepping the ground for concrete.
He borrowed a large ground tamping machine that the owner brought in a brand new Ford F150, that he had in his possession for four hours.
On the way there The machine slid around in the bed and poked two holes in the aircraft- quality aluminum truck box. The stuff must be as thick as an aluminum pie plate.