“I wouldn’t tag the 1940’s for auto trannys. I’d move that to the 50’s since the war pretty much stopped development and production.”
Absolutely!
While, in theory, Oldsmobile had Hydramatic available in the early '40s, VERY few were sold before WWII resulted in a shut-down of auto production. And, even though production resumed in '46, not many people opted for automatic transmissions at that point.
It was not until the early to mid-50s that automatic transmissions became commonplace.
When Pontiac introduced the Hydramatic on its 1948 models, 80% of its inline 8 cylinder models and 50% of the straight 6 models left the factory with Hydramatic. Perhaps the factory forced the automatic on purchasers since the manufacturers had a waiting line for every vehicle produced.
Leno's daily driver is his Roadmaster. It's a restored with a crate engine and Corvette suspension.
@jtsanders … it seems like it is possible if you search the web enough to choose any old car, and there’s a web site saying that car is Jay Leno’s daily driver … lol … I’ve seen references like you say to the Roadmaster, and to a fancy Lamborghini, but there are references to the Model T too, e.g.
Leno: “I’ve got a 1925 Model T that I use as my everyday car, and I have a set of original Ford tools, stamped “Ford,” specifically for it. The fun thing about old cars is you can look at a part and see what’s physically broken and repair it.”
I was invited over to a friend’s house the other evening for dinner, and the wife there has a thing for coffee table books. She must have 50 of them. Maybe even more. Anyway, while waiting, I found one of her coffee table about old cars from the early 1900’s, late 1800’s. Mostly it was just large format drawings of the cars, not much in the way of description. A couple of interesting items from that book:
An early Mercedes used a chain (like a robust bicycle chain, instead of a driveshaft) to drive the rear wheels. And the chain was proudly displayed, clearly visible on the outside of the car, it ran along the side of the car, not underneath.
Another car, I think it was French made, had cylinders and pistons with square (rather than circular) cross sections. Not sure what they were thinking on that one … lol …
1900 - 1915 a number of cars used chain drives. Pretty many odd combinations of drives back then, until they got it figured out.
But square pistons? Used in some steam engines, never heard of a gas engine one:
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/squarepiston/square.htm
I saw a piece on Leno on TV. In the interview, he said that his daily driver was his old Roadmaster sedan that he had rebuild, including a Corvette suspension. He owned it when he lived in Jeersey and long before he was rich and famous. The Late Show used to show him driving up in it at the start. I can’t imagine he would drive a Model T every day given his love of steam cars. If he drove something older than his Mom, I would expect a steamer.
Ok, so far we have:
Engine (cylinder, spark plug, crankshaft, pistons, etc): 1900s
Starter motors: 1930s
Disk brakes: 1950s
Alternators: 1960s (But when were batteries/generators/fan belts commonplace?)
Auto Tranny: 1950s
Starter motors: 1930s
Suspension: 1950s
Fuel injection (No distributor): 1980s
Please keep em coming!
What about the cooling system as we know it?
Radiator, water jackets, coolant, water pump impeller, fan belt.
What decade was this first standard popular and mainstream equipment on most cars?
Automatic headlight dimmers using a photo-electric sensor on the dash were introduced in 1952? in Cadillacs.
This feature should have really caught on, but did not.
The first phonograph player in a car was, I believe offered in the 1952 Chrysler Imperial. It had special slow spinning discs. Was very unreliable and soon dropped. Not sure when 8 tracks made their way into cars, but my first Cassette was in my 1980 Olds Delta 88.
Some of these came earlier:
Engine (cylinder, spark plug, crankshaft, pistons, etc): Invented in 1884, in cars in the 1890s
Starter motors: Invented about 1910, in cars starting 1912
And let’s not forget just how long many of these ideas took
From conception
to prototype
to sellable product
to mass marketing
to industry acceptable standard.
by the time Joe Customer see it on almost every vehicle…how much time has elapsed ? ( the initial subject question )
I took his list as the ‘widely accepted date’ list, all were in use much earlier.
I had a few thoughts
Day night mirrors
"Manual tilt" day/night mirrors first began appearing in the 1930s and became standard equipment on most passenger cars and trucks by the early 1970s.
Hydraulic brakes
Fred Duesenberg originated hydraulic brakes on his 1914 racing cars and Duesenberg was the first automotive marque to use the technology on a passenger car in 1920
Cruise Control
Speed control with a centrifugal governor was used in automobiles as early as the 1910s, notably by Peerless
stolen from wikopedia.
“Fred Duesenberg originated hydraulic brakes on his 1914 racing cars and Duesenberg was the first automotive marque to use the technology on a passenger car in 1920.”
That is true, but Duesenbergs were out of the financial reach of all but the top 1%, so their market penetration with hydraulic brakes was…not significant.
It took Walter P. Chrysler to introduce hydraulic brakes (along with high compression engines and rubber-motor mounts) to lower-priced cars that more people could actually afford–in 1924.
Because GM was not prepared to add hydraulic brakes to their cars at that point, they paid their operatives to plant “news” reports of people who were killed when their cars “stopped too quickly” (whatever that might mean), and Ford did not accept the principle of hydraulic braking for more than a decade after Chrysler introduced that feature to lower-priced cars.
Of course, you can credit Henry Ford’s intransigence and his…less-than-stable…mental state for Ford Motor Company being behind the curve in terms of both braking technology and suspension technology until after his death.
@Texases: Re. chain drive, the FWD GM cars of the late 1960s and 1970s used a chain drive in the transaxle. The torque converter was coupled to the transmission input with a heavy-duty chain. These had big-block, high-output V8s mounted longitudinally with modified THM400 transmissions in kind of a “sea shell” case, all crammed in the front of the car. A LOT of weight on the front. My father had several Toronados like this, and the Caddy Eldorados were the same way. Very cool looking cars. Pop-up vacuum-operated headlights. The dash on the early ones was interesting too with a “roller” speedometer and chrome “eyeball” vents. I thought they were kind of silly when I was a kid, but I wish I had one of the 1966 models today…
Even though there is a lot of stuff on a modern car that was found many years ago, the are very much different and much less effective. Components evolve over time for the better( most of the time) and everything from the old vacuum speed control to a thirty year old AC is so much less effective then today’s variant, I would never call them the same. Just look at windshields ! Just because an old plate glass windshield was technically a windshield, you certainly wouldn’t say it’s the same as today’s safety glass.
@dagosa: I agree with you on everything but the A/C. Cars 30 years ago had some serious A/C. They may not have lasted as long or retained their refrigerant as well, but they put most modern cars to shame in cooling capacity. Of course one of the main problems is the trend of putting as little refrigerant as possible in them now, not the couple of pounds they used to take.