Both the floor mounted high beam switch and auto-dimming headlights were and are bad ideas. Often, the floor switch would get gummed and damaged from salt and snow and water from shoes in the winter. Also, even without salt and snow, dirt would wreck the switch.
And the auto-dimming headlights are just annoying. My aunt had these on a 94 Lincoln Continental and hated them. They would turn the high beams off when light reflected off a road sign, a guardrail, or nothing. And they’d turn off when an approaching car was something like a couple miles distant. It was annoying and dangerous, cause my aunt would have to reach forward and cover the sensor at the base of the windshield.
As far as I’m concerned, these are two features that are better off gone.
ASIDE FROM AUTOMOBILE CTV TRANSMISSIONS. THESE UNITS WERE USED ON MACHINE TOOLS SUCH AS VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL GRINDERS…THE SMOOTHNESS OF THSES TRANSMISSIONS PREVENTED FLAWS IN THE PARTS BEING FINISHED GROUND… ESPECIALLY DURING SPEED CHANGES…
THIS IDEA WORKED WELL WITH GRINDERS…
THERE ARE NO NEW MECHANICAL IDEAS…
THERE MANY GREAT IDEAS IN THE ELECTRONIS WORLD…
I retired in 1997. Before that, a man at work had a magazine article on his work station. A high school automotive instructor was asked by a friend to tune up his old 20’s Buick. He told his class he would demonstrate how improved the new cars were on smog and pollution.
He took that old car into the shop, and tuned it by ear, the way we used to with old cars. Then, he plugged on the measuring device, AND IT PASSED CURRENT SMOG REGULATIONS.
Apparently, those old, slow-turning motors gave time to do a complete burn. Mileage and power were way down, but they were amazingly clean.
I believe it was a 63 Electra convertible. Buick had the syncromesh transmission for that model. Excuse using the term CVT. My memory is not faulty but not exactly sure how it operated just that was why he bought it. It wasn’t the dynaflow used in the other models.
“Synchromesh” indicates a manual transmission whose gears are synchronized so that they do not clash when shifting. If that Buick had an automatic transmission (and by '63, I believe that an automatic was the only choice on that model), then it definitely wasn’t a “synchromesh” transmission. And, it certainly wasn’t a CVT either.
That Buick may have been a nice, luxurious car, but there was nothing extraordinary in the technology of its transmission, as compared to other US cars of the time. My best guess is that the person who owned it was not very knowledgeable about his own car and that he passed on some spurious information about it.
This was a nice feature that I think Oldmobile brought out in either 1957 or 1959. One bulb supplied the light and the fiber optic cables carried the light to the points to be illuminated.
Here is another feature that disappeared and reappeared: Chrysler products from 1941-1949 had a center mounted brakelight. I don’t think the tail lights came on, however. This feature went away in 1950, only to reappear on all cars in 1986.
There is hope for the pushbuttons to control the automatic transmission to return. The year before Chrysler introduced the pushbutton transmission, the Chrysler cars had a lever coming out of the dashboard to select the range for the automatic transmission. This was in 1955 and the feature disappeared to be replaced by the pushbuttons in 1956. I think the Honda Element and probably some other vehicles have the lever coming out of the dashboard for the automatic transmission selector. Who knows–maybe you will get your pushbutton transmission back.
I just read in an old car magazine that Buick used the shiftless Dynaflow transmission because Buick utilized a torque tube drive (enclosed) driveshaft and that this set-up did not have the cushioning effect of an open (hotchkiss) driveline. Therefore, the shifts of the 4 speed hydramatic would be too pronounced on a Buick. I really don’t understand how the open driveshaft would have more cushioning effect. I remember riding in and driving Nash products that utilized the GM hydramatic back in the 1950’s (1950 Nash Ambassador and 1956 Rambler). These cars used a torque tube drive and I don’t remember the shifts in the automatic being all that rough. Anybody have any thoughts on this?