In situations where a driver floored the gas off the line, the gearbox would shift from second to first in drive, then back to second, and then third when the car was up to speed.īecause it had to go through the trouble of licensing a transmission that was in development at Borg-Warner, Ford didn’t save much time over their initial plans to adopt the DG Borg-Warner unit from Studebaker.
First gear was used only if the car was in L (low). The transmission’s original design was technically a three-speed, but when put in D it started in second gear and then shifted to third. Youngren made an easy recommendation: Ford should go and buy the automatic he’d been working on right up to the point he left his former employer. They’d already hired an engineer from Borg-Warner to be their VP of engineering, a man by the name of Harold Youngren. Sensing that a 1951.5 debut of a Ford automatic wouldn’t cut the mustard, Ford decided to spend even more money and obtain their own transmission design. And cash-strapped Studebaker was already late to the automatic game too the DG wouldn’t be ready for two more years – model year 1950 for Studebakers. Studebaker would have a one-year exclusive right to use the DG in its cars before Ford could add it to their lineup. Studebaker was okay with selling the rights with Ford, but their board had a stipulation.
The DG was designed for Studebaker, so Ford approached hat in hand and asked if they could purchase rights to build the DG. It wasn’t designed for Ford, so the folks at Dearborn didn’t own the rights to use it (yet). The gearbox Ford settled on was the DG, a brand new transmission designed by the Detroit Gear division of Borg-Warner. More on that in a moment.įord’s initial idea was to buy an automatic from someone else.
#1965 ford thunderbird 390 engine specs full
By that time, GM had its four-speed Hydra-Matic on sale for a full eight model years. Ford was pretty late to the fully automatic transmission game and only realized circa 1948 that they’d fallen behind the competition. It was the extremely Fifties-sounding Cruise-O-Matic, built with pride in Cincinnati, Ohio.Ĭruise-O-Matic was not designed in-house by Ford but was the first automatic transmission used widely across the Ford-Lincoln-Mercury portfolio. Fine by me! Today we head back to the Fifties to learn about the genesis of all the Cs. The comments honed in on Ford, and the various versions of the C family of automatics. As we finished up our coverage of General Motors’ Turbo-Hydramatic family of transmissions, I asked which gearbox you might like to see covered next by Abandoned History.
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