(first posted 12/8/2017) The sudden disappearance of the pushbutton transmission on Chrysler Corporation vehicles at the end of the 1964 model year has resulted in a lot of speculation over the years. Was it simple market pressure? Or were they outlawed by the government? That question has been batted about here on CC for several years now. But as we are in a debunking of old wives’ tales kind of mood lately, the time has come to tackle this one.
Before 1964, the regulation of equipment on private cars and trucks was a patchwork of state laws with a little federal law thrown in for some spice. But in the years following the creation of interstate highways, accidents were happening at higher speeds and were claiming more lives. The pressure to “do something” was growing.
On August 30, 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-514, entitled “AN ACT to require passenger-carrying motor vehicles purchased for use by the Federal Government to meet certain passenger safety standards.” That act stated that the Government could not buy a vehicle for its own use that did not comply with reasonable passenger safety devices “as the Administrator of General Services shall require.”
The law’s following section gave the Administrator of General Services one year to publish a set of standards. The entire statute is a short one and can be read in full right here: STATUTE-78-Pg696
On January 26, 1965 the GSA’s standards appeared in the Federal Register at pages 797-801. Among them was (on page 800) Standard no. 515/11, entitled “Standard Gear Quadrant (PRNDL) For Automotive Vehicles Equipped With Automatic Transmissions.” The rule stated:
“The order of selection of the gear quadrant shall be park, reverse, neutral, forward drive, and low forward drive (P R N D L). Neutral shall be positioned between reverse and forward drive. In no case shall reverse be positioned adjacent to a forward drive. Reverse, forward drive and low forward drive may be modified to permit various gear ratios in these positions at the option of the manufacturer. Lowest forward gear selected position shall provide a braking effect for downhill driving and the lowest selected gear shall be locked in at 25 miles per hour and under.”
The rule concluded by stating that it was to take effect one year and ninety days after publication (or April 26, 1966). The Federal Register for that date can be perused here. FedRegJan1965
The shift quadrant of the very last Studebaker produced.
And there we are. After April of 1966 the government could not purchase a new car or light truck with the traditional General Motors Hydra Matic quadrant (PNDLR or PNDSLR), but it said nothing about requiring that the acceptable gear order be operated by a lever. GM, of course, probably saw the handwriting on the wall and eliminated the last of the old PNDSLR cars after the 1964 model year. Studebaker, being a purely Canadian manufacturer as of mid 1964 did not care what the U.S. Government would or would not buy, and thus retained its traditional PNDLR quadrant to the bitter end in 1966.
1964 Imperial pushbuttons
Now, back to the Chrysler pushbuttons. This rule is a little ambiguous as to whether it would have affected the government’s purchase of Chrysler vehicles. All then-current pushbutton arrangements in Chrysler products placed the Neutral button between those for Reverse and Drive, so on that score the Chrysler buttons were fine. Chrysler did not, however, make use of a “Park” button. Park was engaged by a lever adjacent to the buttons. So, did the rule which referred to “Park” as being one of a continuous series of choices on the “quadrant” (a term that went undefined) exclude the separate Park lever of the Chrysler system? Or would a separate Park lever have complied with the (not completely clear) rule? This, folks, is how lawyers make their money.
But . . . did these Federal actions have any impact on Chrysler’s decision to ditch the buttons? As of the August 30th enactment date of the 1964 statute the 1965 model production was surely getting underway. And by the time the actual regulations were published in January of 1965, the pushbutton-free lineup from Chrysler was pretty much half way through its first year of production.
Had these rules been enacted a year or two earlier, Chrysler would have undoubtedly faced with a dilemma. The company could have kept the buttons and waited to see if their cars and trucks made the lists of authorized purchases. If they did not, Chrysler surely could have filed suit for a judicial determination, one that I suspect they might have won . . . after years of lost governmental sales. But given the August, 1964-January, 1965 timeline, it is hard to see how these GSA rules could have had any impact at all.
Although it is possible that the government had given some clear advance signals on where it was headed on the shift quadrant issue, it is hard to see how even early informal intelligence on the subject could have come about in time for the engineering and manufacturing issues that the changeover from buttons to levers would have involved. It was in all likelihood impossible that the order for the change came after early 1963 at the very latest. Which, coincidentally, was a little over a year after Lynn Townsend got behind Chrysler’s steering wheel.
It has been well documented that the buttons were very popular with Mopar buyers and not popular with others. Lynn Townsend saw them as a dated impediment to sales growth and wanted them gone. I had long wondered whether there a reason for the button-to-column-lever transition being a hard change for all 1965 models, regardless where they were in their life cycle? I have always wondered why Chrysler didn’t make a slower transition, with the buttons staying on each line until it was redesigned. Why, for example, would it make sense to design a new steering column for the low-volume Imperial? Perhaps because Lynn Townsend saw no upside for the sales growth he sought with pushbuttons still on the dash. I had always wondered if the impending changes in the legal landscape might have stoked the desire to avoid the possibility of getting entangled in the regulatory web that was starting to peek over the horizon. But this research leaves no doubt that the discontinuation of Chrysler’s storied pushbutton transmissions was purely a business decision.
1964 (top with pushbuttons) and 1965 (bottom with lever) Imperial instrument panels.
Another data point worth considering is that Chrysler made substantial revisions to the Torqueflite automatic for the 1966 model run. Among the changes was the replacement of an expensive two cable shifting mechanism and external parking pawl with a single shift rod and internal parking pawl. These changes would not have been very compatible with the older pushbutton design and were surely in their design and engineering phase no later than 1964. The timing of these changes would seem to indicate changes that were part of a larger product plan rather than a quick hack job made to accommodate impending regulations.
In the time following the 1964 law, certain people active in automotive safety began to ask why government employees deserved safer cars than Mr. & Mrs. Public could buy. This, coupled with a groundswell of public opinion following the publication of Unsafe At Any Speed by Ralph Nader, led to passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which began the federal regulatory apparatus that continues in effect today (at 49 CFR 571.102). Which, by the way, did not mention pushbuttons or mandate a lever. In fact the newer rule eliminated the ambiguity of the GSA rule by dropping any reference to “Park” as an assumed part of the shifting order. But the buttons were long gone by the time the newer rules went into effect, so the point was a moot one.
So – – – Final Answer: The Federal Government Did Not Outlaw Chrysler’s Pushbutton Automatic Transmissions. Instead, the decision was driven purely by the business judgment of a new management team which was running as far away from The Forward Look as it could. Had Chrysler wanted to keep the buttons, there might have been legal issues down the road, but only after the spring of 1966. However, the decision to switch to a column shift lever clearly came long before the feds got involved in automotive gear selector mechanisms. So now we know.
Special thanks to Daniel Stern, who provided invaluable input into this analysis.
A fascinating read! Thank you very much.
I’ve always loved the pushbutton shifters. As a kid, there were a lot of 1950s and early 1960s cars sitting around my town, semi-abandoned on the streets (most likely with elderly owners who no longer drove), and as kids, we would poke around them as few people locked their cars (or their houses either, for that matter).
I still remember the Edsel that had the pushbuttons right in the middle of the steering wheel – that really blew my mind. I used to take all kinds of stuff apart to see how it worked, and I was fascinated that they could make this idea work at all.
But sadly, I have never gotten the opportunity to drive a car with a pushbutton shifter. My third car was a 1968 Plymouth Fury III and of course it had the column shift on it.
“But sadly, I have never gotten the opportunity to drive a car with a pushbutton shifter”
They took a little getting used to, just from a “muscle memory” standpoint. For the first few weeks after getting my 59 Fury, I would be grabbing at air on the right side of the wheel after starting the car. A few months later, whenever I would drive my mother’s 74 Luxury LeMans, I would immediately jam my left thumb into the area of the a/c vent. I liked the buttons and found them easy and intuitive to operate.
The first family car I remember was a ’57 Dodge Custom Sierra wagon with the pushbutton transmission. This car was notorious in my family for going through 3 transmissions in four years. Never knew the cause of that (I was 3 years old, when it was traded for a Valiant with a 3-in-the-floor). It was 1972 before the family purchased another car with an automatic. My Dad could hold a grudge.
On the muscle memory part, I recently rented a 2017 Dodge Laramie 4wd pickup with the dash-mounted rotating knob controlling the transmission (I had actually rented a compact, but since I was in Colorado, the truck worked out okay). Really nice truck, but the same issue. I kept hunting for the shift lever. A guy at work has a similar truck, but his has a console-mounted lever. I would have to go that route, if I was ever in the market for a $45,000 truck, which is not very likely.
I too had a previously mentioned push button ’62 Dodge. I would have preferred a column shift, or a floor shift but they weren’t offered. I ran the Dodge at the local drag strip a few times. Going through the automatic gears one at a time was awkward with the push buttons. Somehow a column or floor shifter just felt more “substantial” I guess. Got that definite click when you put it in gear, or did so gear by gear. And sliding a thin lever for park felt untrustworthy. The pics I seen of Packards and Studebakers with column shift auto’s had that odd position on the column, with reverse being where 1st or low gear was. Probably took some getting use too, if you bought one as a collector car.
In ’60-up Chrysler Corp cars with the buttons arranged vertically (top to bottom R-N-D-2-1), gear selection is a cinch whether you’re manœuvring in a parkade or manually selecting 1-2-D at the drag strip (or up a freeway on-ramp). Rest your fingers to the left of the buttons, click the button you want with your thumb, no eyes required, never a miss. Same with the park lever with its vertical throw: up for unlock, down for lock (park). Examples include the ’60-’64 Valiant, the ’62 Dodge Lancer, the ’62-’64 Plymouth, the ’64 Dodge, and the ’61-’64 Imperial.
In ’60-up Chrysler Corp cars with the buttons arranged horizontally (left to right R-N-D-2-1) gear selection is an awkward nuisance no matter what. You have to rotate your wrist to a weird position or cram your arm at a weird inward angle and use your index finger, and you have to look at what you’re doing. Same goes for the horizontal park levers. Examples include the ’60-’63 Dodge and the ’61 Lancer (horizontal buttons, vertical park lever travel).
There is a LeMons racing team that runs a 64 Dart with a pushbutton automatic. They even use the buttons to manually upshift and downshift on the track
If I remember right, the Wanderlodge coach I got to drive while designing a new driver’s station for them back in the mid-late 1980s had a pushbutton transmission. My wife’s family had a pushbutton station wagon that was still around when we married in the late 1980s. Sadly, it had been “running when parked,” but that was in Central Florida, and by the time I saw the car it had sunk to the rockers in the sand.
Can’t think of anything else I’ve driven with a pushbutton transmission.
I have to say it: articles like this “push all the right buttons!”
Thankyouverymuch! I’ll be here all week! Try the veal!
I was in a fairly new coach bus a couple of months ago and I couldn’t help but notice it had a push-button transmission. One nifty feature is that it also had a display above the buttons that seemed to show what gear the transmission was in at the moment.
For awhile our family simultaneously had a ’62 Lancer (buttons), an ’84 Caprice (column), and a ’90 Jetta (floor). It was worst for poor dad in the Jetta: he’d sweep at the left of the dash and find only the headlamp switch, wave around to the right of the steering wheel and find only thin air, and finally remember the floor lever.
Haha! I still do something similar. My last several cars have all been Mercedes, with a foot operated park brake. Now I have a BMW 640 which has an eclectic little lever on the console which you pull up. Yet more often than not a stamp the floor with my foot! This, still, after a year!
I was a young new sales engineer with anew 1964 Plymouth. Transmission buttons on the top left of the dashboard. Greatest concept ever. Never had another.
Just a comment about the Edsel. I’ve seen them at car shows and such, and every owner I have chatted with, says that steering wheel push button set up was a real mess, and should have never been designed. Just give it some thought how it had to work inside a steering wheel hub!
I remember reading a comment on this site in which someone had described the Edsel pushbuttons as an “Electro Mechanical Cluster Bomb” or something like that.
I’ve yet to drive a push button car but have driven a number of trucks with push button Allisons with controls like seen on this page. http://bustekhub.com/index.php/2016/08/02/allison-transmission-shifter-functions-and-prognostics/
Sure sounds to me government interference was the straw that broke the button’s back.
I recently bought a 1959 Dodge P300 with one of these installed and would like to make it operational again. Does anyone know where I can get the parts?
I too grew up with pushbuttons I was born in Detroit and mom’s side of the family were all employed by the Chrysler Corporation. Dad’s side all were employed by the Ford Motor Company, so we drove Fords and Chryslers. I loved the pushbuttons. I liked the way they looked and I loved the way they sounded. I was sorry to see them go, but I knew that they had to cost more to manufacture than the levers. All the dash designs to accommodate them, the cables and the complex lighting behind the dashboard. So I understand the hange. But I still miss them.
Lots of odd shifter patterns out there. My 1970 VW microbus had a reverse sequence with the long manual floorboard stick. Put my foot on the brake, found neutral, then pushed down on the stick, and stuck its knob behind my knee. When asked by a novice with that model vehicle where reverse was, I described that trick. He was in disbelief until he tried it.
Don’t even think about what happens with a right hand drive column stick after it gets modified for left had drive. The little 1950s Hillman of my uncle’s was a hoot to shift with its mirror image pattern. And reverse needed a tug on the stick knob and pushing it into the dash. Still recall that after 63 years.
One thing I’d like to point out; my Fathers family were strictly Mopar owners from the time he was born up until the early 80’s. They had a few of the push button cars. I’ve asked him what he thought of that particular setup, and he said it wasn’t really a big deal, kind of neat, but with one exception. We were from Minnesota, and the push button setup made it difficult to “rock” a car out of a spot if you got stuck in snow. That’s a logical and understandable drawback for those in northern states.
The P-N-D-L-R set up on Studebaker was ideal for “rocking” and I recall it being mentioned in their sales pitch.
That was an explicit goal of the Hydra-Matic series as well.
Thanks for summing this up so well with refs to the regulations.
The first Prius in late 2000 with its electromechanical hybrid power split unit had no need for a shift lever, but Toyota bent over backwards to make its driving experience as normal as possible, so it had a stout shift lever with a PRNDB sequence, B for extra engine Braking on steep downhills, exactly analogous to the L on a conventional transmission.
Later Prius went to a small obviously electronic joystick with a separate pushbutton for Park.
Now with electronically controlled automatics, hybrids and electric cars, almost any car can have pushbutton shifting and the buttons are back. Lincoln has pushbuttons on the dash now. My electric Fiat 500e has pushbuttons below the dash. Any other examples out there?
I’ve been thinking that for full electrics with two drive modes (Powerglide-emulator and enhanced-regenerative-braking) there should be pushbuttons for P, R and N and the kind of electrical switch you *throw* for going between “low” and “high gear”.
It’s amazing how much of what goes into a car is by way of government regulation-in the U.S., the PRNDL arrangement, seatbelts, airbags, thick A-, B-, and C-pillars, backup cameras, headlights (for years even the shape!), T-Tops, the 85-MPH speedometer; in at least parts of Europe hood ornaments are now deemed unsafe for pedestrians and thus banned.
This was a fascinating read!
I’ve never driven a car with a push-button transmission; I’d gladly take a spin in a ’64 Imperial. I don’t think I’d be up for the Edsel, however, with the buttons in the middle of the steering wheel. Too weird for me!
I reckon once the Federal Government gets involved in something it’s nigh on to impossible to get it ‘un-involved’. That’s not to say all government regulations are bad as that’s way too simplistic. It’s just that Big Govt. never knows when to quit.
I’d rather own an ‘under-regulated’ car than an ‘over-regulated’ one. That’s my preference.
+1 for the most interesting article on Push-Button Automatics.
As someone who enlisted in the Navy in 1970 I can tell you the U. S. government bought a pretty substantial amount of Chrysler cars and trucks. (I don’t know when it happened, but due to Chrysler’s “ability” to regularly underbid both Ford and GM for fleets, eventually a regulation was passed telling those folks that did the purchasing that a very strong effort must be made to “balance” the brands of vehicles in government fleets.) Even so, in the 60s,70s, and into the 80s Chrysler vehicles (seemed?) to outnumber the other Big 3 vehicles in fleets.
Having said that, my mother’s maiden aunt owned a 56 and a 64 Plymouth, both with push-button automatic transmissions. I only ever rode in the 56, but I did drive the 64 a few times, and that lever for PARK always threw me for a loop. (Even in the accompanied pictures, the “arrangement for the park lever is different/non standardized.) Which way do you push it if you want to get out of park?/when you got in the car was park engaged….or not?
Sorry, but in my opinion this feature was discontinued because it confused non/new owners and was therefore unsafe.
Until at least the mid-90’s, Dodges and Plymouths were the predominant government fleet car. That changed when GM begin low-balling Cutlass Cieras. Now, except for mini-vans and SUVs, it’s a toss-up among brands, we’ve got a bunch of HHRs, Nissans, and Fusions ( a favorite among drivers). Last fleet car purchase I authorized was a 2018 Camry Hybrid.
The very first 2012 Ford Focus I ever saw in the metal in the spring of 2011 was wearing US Government plates, which seemed odd since they usually seem to buy from the other end of the product cycle.
Yes, true about the Mopar government fleet cars. When I worked out at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, operated by contractors to the Department of Energy, we had a bunch of drab-gray 4-door K-cars and some of them had I kid you not, floor-shifted MANUAL transmissions! In a fleet! Grind ’em ’till you find ’em was good advice for trying to find the gears in one of those things.
The park lever was clearly marked PARK → or PARK↓, as applicable. You pushed it in the direction of the arrow to put the car in park. People didn’t tend to have problems with it.
The reason you saw so many Chrysler products was not low bid but a government program of buying from the smallest supplier to maintain production capability and capacity. That’s why the USAF bought so many Dodge & IH pickups for so many years . My G-dad was car salesman and he LOATHED the Edsel hub selector.
Too bad Mopar didn’t go with buttons for their more recent models instead of the knob. It would have been an obvious heritage hat tip.
My 2013 Grand Caravan had the gear selector jutting out of the dash just like the 1955 Chrysler Corp. cars with Powerflite. LOVED IT!
Wow. Excellent historical perspective. Thanks for the research!
Sorry, but I’m not on board as this being purely driven by the company’s desire to run are far away from the Forward Look as possible. Someone in the gov’t didn’t just wake up one day and write the rule. It was most likely a growing problem that they new about for some time and they finally decided that a solution needed to be codified. I’m sure it came about after the gov’t had to fix too many pool cars where the driver went and got into a different vehicle and operated the shift lever in the manner of their own current car of as that of the last pool car they had driven. So someone who was used to R being all the way down hopped in a car where that was Low and proceeded to run into the car in front of them as they tried to back out of the spot. Or trying to “pull it down into low” when going down a hill and end up putting it in reverse and damaging the transmission.
The Govt almost certainly gave the auto companies warning that they were considering making a rule, once they decided that different shift patterns were the cause. Since this was new territory no one would know for sure whether the rule would take effect immediately or at some time in the future.
As far as why they did them all at the same time, it is highly unlikely that the Imperial used a steering column that far removed from those used in Plymouths. So might as well convert all at the same time.
So while the gov’t clearly didn’t outlaw push buttons, they fact that the probably had informed the mfgs that they were considering making a rule probably planted a seed in Chrysler that the desire to run away from The Forward Look just nurtured them into doing it sooner rather than later.
The story I’ve read – and this is from writer and former Chrysler designer Jeffrey Godshall – is that Lynn Townsend wanted the push-button controls gone because research had shown that they were the main reason a significant number of GM and Ford owners wouldn’t even consider a Chrysler Corporation vehicle.
When Townsend took over Chrysler, its market share was sinking to around 10 percent, thanks to the unpopular 1961 cars, followed by the 1962 downsizing disaster. The corporation thus had to capture sales from Ford and GM if it wanted to recover.
At any rate, by the early 1960s, the hot set-up was floor-mounted shifters for both automatics and manuals. The push-button controls were seen as old-fashioned.
I agree with some of what you say – the non-standardized shift quadrants was certainly causing accidents from folks who got confused in an unfamiliar car. But I think that the biggest problem was the order of gears on cars with column shifts. The Ford driver who expects to find Low but who accidentally finds Reverse in his brother’s Oldsmobile probably happened pretty often. This was the subject of one of the chapters of Unsafe At Any Speed, as I recall. But I don’t think the buttons were the main issue here as they were so wildly different from any car with a lever that they almost required undivided attention from the unfamiliar driver.
I do dispute your statement that “the government” was likely giving warning that they were considering a rule. “The Government” of the early 60s was a lot different from “The Government” of even the 70s. There was no auto safety body, no NHTSA, and no executive branch agency with any standing authority to order carmakers to do anything. All of it would have to come from Congress, which was, of course, completely decentralized, with any law needing to go through the cumbersome legislation process we all learned about in grade school. There may have been a congressman or two who was known for auto safety issues, but the activist government that we know today was much less common then. The fact that the first federal auto safety requirements were under the form of GSA purchasing specs suggests to me that nobody was pushing a more generalized safety scheme at the time (1962-64).
If there was an issue with the push buttons, it was that Chrysler didn’t standardize a pattern among its different car lines.
In an issue of Automobile Quarterly, a former Chrysler stylist tells the story of someone who drove his wife’s Valiant, which had a different pattern than his full-size Plymouth. He pressed the button he thought would be for reverse. It turned out to be the drive button. The car shot forward, and crushed a barbecue grille in the garage.
But that was basically an issue to people who went from one Mopar to another. As you note, anyone going from a GM or Ford (aside from some 1958 Edsels and 1957-58 Mercurys) product to a Mopar would have been careful because they weren’t used to push-button controls in general.
The ones from the 50s were sometimes a little different. By 1960 the buttons were standardized with Reverse being either at the top or at the left (depending on whether the panel was oriented vertically or horizontally). But a little looking proved that my 59 Plymouth had Drive at the top, then Neutral, then Reverse, then 2 and 1. The neutral button was between D and R, but swapping the Drive and Reverse buttons would be an issue, and it was still possible to hit 2 instead of R, which was right above it. I also found a picture of a 57 Imperial panel where Reverse and Drive were right next to each other. So it was a hodgepodge until 1960 or so.
The other difference was that the pre 61(?) versions lacked the Park lever. The drill was to punch the Neutral button then yank on the umbrella handle parking brake – which was a big drum brake that acted on the driveshaft at the tail end of the transmission. The park lever (with its external parking pawl) eliminated the traditional Chrysler driveshaft parking brake, in favor of a more normal design that worked on the back wheels.
The Park pawl arrived with the new aluminum case A-727 in 1962.
It had not occurred to me that the Chrysler buttons were not standardized. That’s pretty bad.
The park lever and pawl actually arrived with the new aluminum-case A-904 in 1960 on the Valiant, and was also present with the same transmisssion in 1961 in the Valiant and Lancer, but was not used—even with the 6-cylinder engine and aluminum-case A-904—in the ’60-’61 Plymouth or Dart. It did spread to the rest of the model range, whether equipped with an A-904 or an A-727, for ’62.
(There’s a pawl/Paul joke in here somewhere, but I’m too tired to go digging.)
If I remember correctly, the operation is based on the shape or size of the buttons themselves rather than the arrangement. So you can disassemble the control unit, put the buttons however you want, and R still gets you reverse, etc.
I doubt anyone’s reading these comments anymore, but I came over here from 83lebaron’s Dodge 440 post which mentioned the Park lever on push button Mopar’s coming along in 1963. My memory told me that our neighbor’s ‘61 Valiant had a Park lever (I drove it a few times in the early ‘70’s) so thanks Daniel Stern for confirming that the compacts got it earlier. IIRC the Valiant had the buttons, and the lever, oriented vertically.
I meant to add, that while the GSA spun the requirement as a safety feature it was probably more driven by the cost of fixing cars due to mistakes.
Sure there might not have been a formalized “notice of proposed rule making” that there is today. However that doesn’t mean that those people who were tasked with managing the GSA fleet wouldn’t have had discussions with the sales people they were negotiating with. The fleet manager would not want to find himself w/o any cars that met the specs, or that only 1 make was on the approved list. Either of which could have meant a nightmare for him.
I have read the stuff that claim that Ford and GM owners wouldn’t consider a Chrysler car due to the push buttons, but I’ve also read that that Chrysler customers really loved them. So did you stand more to gain in stealing Ford and GM buyers than loosing current, possibly long time faithful customers. Of course at the time stealing 2-3% of GM’s and Ford’s customers would have been worth loosing a lot of their current customers.
I agree that the problem was the differing orders of column shift gears and not push buttons but that doesn’t mean that Chrysler wouldn’t be scared if they caught wind of the GSA planing on requiring a standardized shifter when their push buttons were anything but standard when compared to Fords and Chevys. Plus as others have noted Chrysler did rely on GSA and other fleet contracts for a much larger percentage of their sales than the other guys.
You are right, JP, the PNDLR shift quadrant issue is addressed in “Unsafe at Any Speed” in Chapter 2: Disaster Deferred, page 45. In 1961,my dad had a 1961 Olds Super 88 with the Roto-Hydramatic “Slim JIm” transmission and when he brought home a new 1961 Thunderbird for my mom it just blew my mind to see Reverse after Park when I was so used to seeing it after “Super” on his Olds.
Also (of course it was a few years earlier) the low-volume Imperial had a new, different instrument panel each of the years 1959 (changed from 1958), 1960, and 1961 (which they used for 3 years, 61-63). The 64-66 Imperial had yet a different panel. I guess styles changed quickly in the early 60’s but to me it is a mystery why they would have redesigned the instrument panel on a low volume model 3 years in a row..other than style).
So redesigning the column to use a shift quadrant (though done a few years later) was probably less of a change. Also, didn’t they have to add turn signal lever (which was on the dashboard on the pushbutton shift models) to the column at this time?
I often wonder about the 1960 Imperial…it was of course based on the ’57, but had a lot of 1 year changes (from ’59) that went away in 1961. That must have cost a mint on a low production car (maybe they were desparately chasing Lincoln and Cadillac and cost was no object to try to gain market share?)
I remember watching Robin Williams in the movie “Awakenings” shift the column shift of what looked to me to be his ’64 Dodge Polara (which still should have had the dash buttons) and wondered how the car had a column shift.
Where was the parking brake on the manual shifted cars (of the push button era of automatics)? If on the dash like on the automatics it might have been easier to disengage on a hill than the lever for a foot operated parking brake?
Did older manual MOPAR cars have the driveshaft mounted parking brake (as was fitted to the pre-’62 automatic cars?
My parents had a 1957 Chrysler, which I drove on the farm some, but not on any public roads. I don’t remember a park lever or how to put it into Park. Looking at google pictures of the 57’s I don’t see one either.
That is because they didn’t have a park lever or any sort of park function. At the time it was not uncommon to use a separate parking brake on the transmission output on manual trans vehicles and that is what Chrysler did with their early automatics. I guess the reasoning was if the drive shaft was locked by that brake why would you need to lock the transmission.
Yup, exactly. A parking pawl serves to lock the driveshaft in place. Chrysler’s parking brake until the early ’60s was a drum brake acting on the driveshaft, so the pawl was redundant until Chrysler went to a rear-service-brakes parking brake arrangement.
When I was a car-mad five-year-old, I managed to break the pushbuttons in our 1959 Dodge station wagon (the ultimate 50s-mobile: pushbuttons, tailfins and two-tone salmon pink with metallic bronze). Some buttons were jammed behind the bezel and wouldn’t come out – since reverse was one of them, my mother eventually had to drive in second gear over the lawn and to the local garage where they managed to free everything up.
So there you are – another possible reason.
Chrysler’s pushbutton system was actually quite trouble-free over the years. Not that anything couldn’t go wrong – after all, we have heard lots of reports of manual 3 speeds of various manufacturers with binding shift linkages.
Now the electro-mechanical systems that others used, that was a different story. But I have never heard any general discontent with the Mopar cables. In fact, I suspect that you could walk up to most of the abandoned Mopars of the era and the shift mechanism would still be working just fine.
The linkage for the pushbuttons wasn’t that different than for a lever. The principle is the same: You’re changing the effective length of the shift cable to move the transmission’s manual shift valve.
Another great article! Having never driven a push-button Mopar, I’ve always wondered what would happen if you accidentally punched “R” while going forward. Was there some sort of safety mechanism or did you get abrupt and expensive noises?
Since Mopar’s buttons mechanically operated a cable shifter, I expect the result would be the same expensive whiplash you’d get from pushing a column shifter into “R” at speed.
Today electric buttons just talk to a computer chip, which would surely keep things safe. All the same I’m not going to try it on my Fiat just to find out.
Depending on the vehicle there may still be mechanical control of reverse on an electronically controlled transmission. On some the P R N and D functions were all still controlled by the linkage moving a valve and the computer only decided which of the forward gears to engage based on road speed, load and lever position. The oil path through the control valve stays the same no matter which of the forward positions it is in. This also means that an electrical glitch couldn’t cause unintended operation like engaging a forward gear when reverse since there is no fluid available for the forward solenoids.
The neutral safety/back up light switch morphed into the manual lever position sensor.
On all three generations of Ford Hybrids that still had a traditional shift lever there is a shift cable that operates the parking pawl. I assume they have changed to a solenoid or motor on the latest models that have done away with the lever but it is there in my 2013 C-Max. The interesting thing that it has that my previous Hybrids didn’t is an “OD cancel” button on the side of the shifter and they call it that in the owner’s manual. It provides a boost in off throttle regen braking in some situations instead of the drastic effect shifting it into L has. Of course if you know how to drive a hybrid you can do that with the brake pedal and not worry about overheating the friction brakes on a long down grade, so I think it more to appease the uninitiated and still comply with the regulations of the operation of the L position.
My second car was a PNDSLR ’62 Pontiac Bonneville with HydraMatic. As I recall, the R position was hydraulically locked out in the valve body above about 5 MPH. It seems likely that Chrysler could’ve done something similar with their pushbutton system.
TorqueFlite did this as well, although the manual says the reverse lockout engages at “approximately 10–15 mph.”
The first TorqueFlite automatic transmission was the A-488, launched in the 1956 Imperial. Sealed in an iron case, this first TorqueFlite had both a front and rear pump, the latter allowing push-starts. Because the transmissions were shifted by pushbuttons, the transmission had a reverse blocker valve that shifted them into Neutral when drivers accidentally punched Reverse while moving forward….
When the company moved from pushbuttons at the end of the 1964 model run, they simply used the same kind of cables that had previously been put in motion by pushbuttons. Then, for the 1966 model year, engineers changed the transmissions to be shifted by a single-rod linkage; and, since it was harder to accidentally go into Reverse while moving forward, they dropped the reverse blocker valve.
https://www.allpar.com/mopar/torqueflite.html
I seem to remember this in the 1965 New Yorker, if reverse was selected while moving forward at all it would make a clicking sound and refuse to go into reverse.
While your info is 100% correct, the HydraMatic had one unnerving tendency, that being if the transmission fluid wasn’t changed religiously at regular intervals AND kept up to proper level – this transmission was known to drip all over the place after about two years’ worth of use on the road due to lousy pan gaskets – that hydraulic lockout would not engage as it relied on sufficient Dexron in the tranny to activate it. I remember a few kids I went to high school with, who had these units and accidentally shifted from D, through L and into R with spectacular results…usually destroying the transmission in the process.
I mistakenly flipped my 60 corvair power glide into reverse at about 40 mph instead of low. Wheels locked up and engine stalled. Flipped it back into drive and restarted it and nothing was damaged.
This happened to my Dad shortly after buying his ’60 Dodge. (He traded in his ’56 Chevy 210, but that car was a 3 on the tree). Since it was his first car with an automatic, he was going down the road about 30 mph playing with the buttons. As he tells the story, he accidentally pushed the button for reverse. The rear wheels started squealing backwards, and in a cloud of blue smoke, the car came to an abrupt halt. He thought for sure that he broke the transmission of his new car. He kept the car for 6 years, trading it in on a ’66 Impala, never having had a problem with his Seneca’s drive train. He was lucky I guess, or those Mopar transmissions were pretty tough.
Yes, the Mopar drivetrains were tough, on my first car a 318 Valiant, A friend and I had replaced the Torqueflite. ( they weren’t totally unbreakable !!! )
We didn’t have our licenses yet so my friends Dad test drove the car to make sure we had put it all back together properly, The column shifter was very loose and he found reverse at about 20 or 30 mph, same thing happened as yours with no damage.
At around the same time another friend had a Holden 6 cylinder Powerglide, we were hooning around on a dirt road when he found reverse, broke the engine mounts which sent the fan through the radiator.
When it came to basic engineering Chrysler was damn good
If memory serves me, friends of my parents had a ’56 DeSoto wagon with the pushbutton selector. During the demonstration drive, the owner purposely punched “R” while driving about 35 mph. The car slowed to a stop then began to reverse.
A youth pastor at my church once said his dad would sometimes punch in Reverse while at speed, just to amuse himself (and startle passengers) as the bias-ply tires broke loose squealing and set the car squirming and fishtailing for a moment or two before punching it back into Drive.
Yes, there is a reverse blocker valve in the valve body of the twin-cable/twin-pump Torqueflites (i.e., all those controlled by buttons, plus the ’64 and ’65 lever-shift units). Shift to Reverse above a very low forward road speed—without looking it up, I think it was 3 or 4 mph—and the transmission shifts harmlessly into Neutral and remains there until the car is stopped and another gear selected (unless the driver selects a forward gear while the car is still moving forward and Reverse is still selected, then forward drive resumes). This was one of a fairly long and costly list of parts and mechanisms Chrysler were able to eliminate with the ’66 simplification; it was felt that the mechanical gating of the lever shifters was sufficient to prevent inadvertent selection of Reverse during forward drive—though if the driver does it deliberately, I suppose the results are deserved.
I don’t recall the exact details but I recall reading that some of the mid 50’s to 60’s automatics had their valve bodies set up so that a “blocker” would activate above a certain TV pressure and prevent the reverse shift valve from moving thereby preventing it from shifting into reverse.
My 60 corvair had a lever operated cable shift for the powerglide and I thru it into reverse at 40 mph once by accident (meant to shift it to low). Realized my mistake as soon as the wheels locked and skidded and threw it back into drive whereupon the car just went on about it’s business. No apparent damage was done.
Also, pushbutton automatics are back. Here’s the current Lincoln MKX with pushbuttons for the transmission along the left edge of the center stack. I had an MKX rental and could not get used to the controls at all… But they are no doubt legal, and in the mandated PRNDS order.
Great read, JPC! Thanks for filling in some gaps in my family’s history that were a little fuzzy. Too bad about cousin Studie PNDLR. It’s a shame that he died early. His branch of our family were a great bunch.
In the early 80’s my dad had a ’64 Chrysler 300 coupe (non letter version.) It had a 383 2-bbl and was a pretty lively performer. It did take some time to get used to setting the park lever. I think I read on CC that up until about ’59, Chrysler transmissions didn’t have a parking pawl, so no park lever.
I never tried pushing the reverse button while moving forward in my dad’s 300. Even though the car was a beater, if anything would’ve broken due to such a stupid stunt, I wouldn’t be around to write this today. 😉
When I was a kid, we had a 56 Desoto with push buttons. Later, as a teen, a worked on a farm where I occasionally drove a 63 Dart wagon with pushbuttons.
My wife recently got a 2017 Fusion and the it has the dial type transmission selector – kind of looks like an old TV channel knob to me.
I’m certainly not one of those tinfoil-hat-wearing, anti-government nutjobs, but this is an early example of legislation by coercion. Some might call it blackmail.
“We’re not going to tell you how to make cars, but you’ll lose one of your biggest customers (government fleet sales) if you don’t build them the way we say”.
Same thing happened with the 55MPH speed limit after the ’73 OPEC embargo.
“We’re not going to require states to enact a 55HPH speed limit, but any state that doesn’t will lose all federal highway funding.”
It’s an odd way to legislate.
Any customer can chose not to buy a product because its design doesn’t suit them, right? Especially if they think it’s less safe?
As to the 55 limit, it was the only way to enact a national limit. Or try to.
Isn’t all legislation “coercion” or “blackmail”? Do this or suffer the consequences. What other way is there to legislate? Ask folks nicely to please do….?
Paul, I think there’s a significant difference between writing a law mandating PRNDL and writing a law saying, effectively, “build and shifter you’d like, but the government will not buy any car without a PRNDL shifter.”
It’s a lot like your rental housing business. You can build a house any way you’d like, and without permits, but the government will come along and condemn it, and you won’t be able to rent it.
But they’re not telling you what to do, they’re only telling you the consequences of not doing it their way.
I’m not following your logic, but that probably won’t be the first time. 🙂
A key point you’re missing is that the government had not yet decided to step into automobile regulation, as that required massive legislation. Tat was done in 1966, with the National Traffic Safety and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. And the DOT and NTSB were all established in 1966 too. Until these massive agencies were legislated, funded and staffed, the government really couldn’t readily legislate auto safety. it required a mammoth agency; legislators knew shit about the details of safety.
This 1964 GSA legislation was just a tiny shot over the bow. They could do this because it was quick and easy. The first step of very many to come. A preview of coming attractions.
Does this make more sense now?
It’s not really any different than the building codes. They started out quite modest many decades ago, and keep getting more demanding and technical, especially in terms of energy savings, etc.
The example you cited is not relevant. Sure I can build a house that doesn’t meet code and risk getting fined. But the car makers can do the same thing. Ask VW about how that works. They got away with it for ten years.
It’s no different: build it according to our rules, or if not, be prepared for the consequences.
ACTUALLY, that “arm twisting” by the federal government hit it’s stride AFTER the requirements for a standardized shift pattern. Just as they did with airbags, customers AND auto manufacturers resisted the efforts to add seat belts to cars. Customers were in no mood to purchase something they knew they would never use.
And remember, about the time the shift pattern was standardized, back up lights were still optional.
Mandatory back up lights was another of the 1965 GSA specs.
Yes but the back up light rule could be easily satisfied. Even if they were an extra cost option according to the retail catalog, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t throw them in for free on a big fleet order.
I know that one of my state’s fleet vehicle rules are that all vehicles are delivered with 4 “keys” thanks to transponder keys and now keyless starting fobs. The state doesn’t care if it is listed as a separate line item with attached cost or not, just that they are included in the overall bid price.
I didn’t know that, JPC. So was it model year 1965 or ’66 that those back-up lights were *mandatory*? Curious!
Same thing with CARB (California Air Resources Bureau). When they come up with obscenely-stupid emissions regulations, auto manufacturers make them effective nation-wide because of the outsized California car market – and the legislators and regulators in Sacramento know it well. All it would take to end this madness is for one or two of the major car builders to tell the Great Bear State to go to hell, and refuse to offer their vehicles for sale there. When a number of California motorheads realize they no longer can buy cars they want just because of the ignorant pigheadedness of the government weenies who think they know better than anyone, perhaps this crap will stop. Until then, I will keep my two 1990 vehicles going thanks to RockAuto in Wisconsin and FCP/Euro in Connecticut.
FWIW, here’s a **June** 1964 announcement that Chrysler would drop the pushbuttons:
As teeny-boppers, and budding hot rodders a friend, who had a “power raked” ’59 Plymouth Fury 318 with dual quads, cut outs etc, discovered that if he pushed the R button just right….the car would continue moving forward but the backup lights would come on!
One fine Friday night while cruising the Cap Square (then THE area to see and be seen) in Madison, WI we had a Chevy 409 wagon riding our rear bumper. So my buddy lightly pushed the R button. The SCREECH of burning, flat spotted rubber was quite impressive!! 🙂 As the fine fellows in the Chevy seemed to fail to see the humor, we boogied and they tried to follow down E. Washington Ave. Never a black and white when you want one!! :):)
We finally lost them out by Monona Grove: more teenage excitement than a normal Friday or Saturday night burning up lot$ of ga$. Interesting automatic; couldn’t do that with a “slip n slide” (Power Glide)………..DFO
Terrific story Dennis!
I’ve driven one when I was 15. My grandfather had a used car lot and had a 1094 Chrysler Newport on it with the push button automatic. I never knew that was the last year for it. I just drove it up the street a bit just to say I’d driven it.
I doubt there’s many people my age (born 1985) who have driven a push button automatic, column shift manual (’69 and ’74 F100) and a full non syncro crashbox (’47 Willys)
A 1094 Newport, huh? Sounds like Chrysler’s getting medieval on us now. 😉
Haha, wow, how did I miss that?
1964, it was a 1964.
I’m picturing an 11th century knight riding into battle… in a Chrysler Newport. And with that pushbutton transmission there’s no need to put down your sword!
+1 😀
Having never driven one of these pushbutton transmission cars, was there any actual advantage to using pushbuttons instead of a lever? Or were they just a case of late 1950s futurism (that is simply an attempt to appear cool and modern to consumers of the day)? From my 21st century perspective these pushbutton gear selectors are neat as an historical oddity, but also come across as sort of gimmicky to me. Like Chrysler was trying to be different just for the sake of being different.
I never understood the point of having a lever with a transmission you only operate when the car is stationary – unless you’re part of the .01% of drivers who actually use the low gears in this day and age – The lever just seems an archaic holdover from the past, a waste of space in a center console and a beacon of the cars quality or lack-thereof based on it’s design/materials.
In the late 40’s and early 50’s, it was no longer fashionable to have a floor mounted shifter, which is why practically everything from back then uses a column shifter whether it is an automatic or manual. I always assumed the push-buttons were an extension to that.
I’ve never driven one so I can’t say for sure, but they always came off as a bit gimmicky to me too. Getting the transmission off the floor does provide some benefits in terms of making the front bench more useable, but the push-button transmission seems like it would be a bit of a step backwards as it would be a lot harder to operate by feel. But maybe if I drove one my opinion might be changed.
I drove a few back in the day. Frankly, it was a bit annoying to have to look carefully and hit the right button. It was not all that intuitive, for anyone other than a confirmed Moparmaniac. And grabbing a quick downshift into second or first would have taken some serious motor-planning, unless you were really used to thta. Not the same as just giving the lever a yank, which required no need to take the eyes off the road. Which was a good thing, as my manual downshifts usually came at a moment where my senses were rather well-taxed already, if you know what I mean.
Which of course explains why pragmatic Lynn Townsend killed them. They only confirmed what most folks thought of Chryslers, that they were a bit odd. Townsend saw that for what it was, and set out to make them all decidedly un-odd. And he succeeded.
There was no upside in keeping them, but there was a downside. So the decision to me seemed pretty obvious.
Frankly, by this time, the push buttons were already anachronistic; a relic of the push-button fad of the 50s. It was well played out by 1965.
That’s a good summary of what my dad told me about these. Trendy and unique, but not exactly user friendly in the real world. I wonder if console mounted buttons would have been better? In today’s keypad obsessed society, I’d wager it wouldn’t be the issue it was then.
Quick edit: I wonder if the push button concept was a way to attract female buyers? Possibly typewriter types? Could very well be off base there so who knows.
In today’s keypad obsessed society, I’d wager it wouldn’t be the issue it was then.
It seems the only people who love putting a bazillion nearly identical buttons on an instrument panel now are the designers. Models like the 2012 Focus and Buick Cascada draw howls from anyone who has to make that mess work.
2012 Focus
Personally I prefer the mess-o-buttons to the everything-is-controlled-by-the-touchscreen theory of design in modern cars. With that said, the two examples you show seem to be the worst of both worlds, where you have to use the screen for most everything except the climate control, and you still have a mess-o-buttons to deal with.
@ Todd on that Ford center stack that center display isn’t a touch screen it just shows current audio and clock and if your phone is connected current battery level and signal strength. Those things that look like buttons on the screen are just letting you know what the unmarked lower buttons do at that particular time. The D pad around the knob is only used for things like adjusting the fader or paring a phone so it isn’t commonly used. There is a landmark bump in the center of the 5 so it didn’t take long to get used to using that by touch. However there are controls on the steering wheel to adjust the volume and cycle through presets or tracks. There is also Sync so you can just talk to the car and tell it for example you want to listen to Bluetooth audio.
The C-Max I just purchased shares that audio interface and overall it isn’t bad to use.
My parents just bought a new CX-5, and nearly everything is controlled by a rotary dial in the console. They don’t even own Smartphones, yet they love the intuitive setup that Mazda has. Times sure seem to have changed in this regard.
You say that as if it’s somehow something new. Here’s the 1991 Oldsmobile 98. It’s especially egregious given the size of the buttons and age of the typical Olds buyer:
I just had lunch with my longtime Mitsubishi i-MiEV owning friend, and he made a similar argument for the lever. He immediately said what if you’re stopped behind someone and they suddenly start backing up? You need to reach that lever and shift to reverse immediately.
I confess that I do still need to look down at the Fiat’s pushbuttons to push the right one. Much as I like the idea of buttons, they have that disadvantage.
After checking a number of EVs and full hybrids, they all use a joystick (Prius, Leaf, Bolt) or a column stalk/switch (Tesla, BMW) or an ordinary floor shifter (Volt, Mitsu). As reported above, some combustion cars and trucks now have a dial. Haven’t found any other pushbuttons besides Fiat 500e and all Lincolns except the Navigator.
Well what if there is a car right behind you? If this scenario is sudden and immediate in time, what’s to say that car will be so quick to react or is even paying attention (or the car(s) behind it)?
The lever may even be detrimental if it’s more intuitive for you, allowing you to hastily react to the car backing up before you can assess just how far the car in front needs to reverse, or the space behind you if you can even avoid being collided into.
Of course if you’re aware of what’s behind you then you can’t do that.
I’ll offer another situation, if you’ve got your nose out to see what’s coming at a blind corner. (I have this problem at the end of my street all the time.) Get your nose out too far and you may suddenly wish to pull back.
I think the larger point Paul and I are making is that the shifter is one of the active driving controls, unlike everything else on the dash, and you might need to use it without looking.
I agree with that point, but mine is that I don’t necessarily think that buttons are inherently worse, all else being equal. PRNDL levers are without exception in two places in every car, these days more like one, and only move through the pattern in a direction. That’s where they’re most intuitive, because any odd car you get into for whatever reason you’ll be accustomed to it, but if the levers were positioned and laid out in such a free way as Pushbuttons can be, say on the dash using a lateral movement, they’d be no more intuitive from the norm as pushbuttons are.
Ultimately you get used to it and all controls become part of muscle memory. The radio may not by definition be an active driving control but I’d bet most of us who’ve become familiar with their own cars don’t need to take their eyes off the road to fiddle with the volume knob or preset buttons. Same goes for the pushbutton auto shifter, which you’re actually rarely using while the car is moving, unlike the radio.
That situation definitely makes for a better argument though
Several Honda/Acura models now have pusbutton transmission controls onthe console.
Those buttons were designed for a cruising experience. “We have designed a wonderfully automatic transmission, so just push the button and let the transmission take care of you.”
For the guy who wanted to exert some actual override or control, the lever was more intuitive.
I get that. But not everyone lives in the flat Midwest. 🙂 In Colorado, my father was constantly shifting into 2nd and 1st, uphill or down. And it’s not exactly very consistent with Chrysler’s performance image, one they had been cultivating for some time. Which actually leads me to another reason they dropped the buttons: they were incompatible with floor shifters, which were the hot thing starting in 1962. And sportiness became a critical factor starting in the early 60s. Push buttons were not at all compatible with that image. Consider Ford marketing their “Select-Shift” automatic starting in 1964, or sooner?
The more I think about this issue, the more it’s completely obvious (to me, anyway) that Chrysler was increasingly feeling out on a limb with their push buttons. Ford and Packard also had them for few years, when they were a hot new fad. And that’s really what they were: a fad.
Can you honestly say there was any genuine advantage to them? Certainly Chrysler owners got used to them (mostly), but everyone else thought they were annoying when you had to drive one.
It’s like the ’57’s fins: Chrysler tried to claim that it made the cars more stable at speed. Nobody bought that either. Push buttons went the way of fins; a fad that Chrysler hung on to for a few years too long.
There was at least one floor shifter during the pushbutton era in the 64 Chrysler 300K. I agree that they were a cool new thing in 1956 and were an oddball anachronism by 1964.
For pure automatic operation they were simpler than the lever and attendant linkages, but that’s the best I can do in their defense.
With modern technology, I could see the pairing of pushbuttons and paddle shifters as a good solution.
The 1964 Sport Fury and Polara 500 also had console mounted automatic shifters.
Presumably, the floor-shift automatic was an easy and quick change for 1964, because it used the standard steering column. The big changeover for 1965 required tooling new steering columns.
THe fins did make them more stable at speeds. Chrysler had test results showing it. But the speeds were at about 70+ and virtually no one drove that fast back then.
I had an AP5 Valiant (oz version of the ’63) with push button. Can’t remember any grief with the system, but do remember the thrill of discovering this car that I was about to buy had push buttons.
That was a really great piece JPC. Along with Paul’s epic, it has been a particularly good week for CC. This is why I love this place.
I remember back in the schoolyard in 60s Australia, the kids whose Dads had pushbutton shifted Valiants had definite bragging rights.
My hunch would be dropping the buttons was more a matter of them not being fashionable anymore, just like tailfins, “jet tube” taillights, dagmars, bomb sight/airplane hood ornaments and other aircraft/spacecraft design ideas.
By 64, Packard and Edsel had gone toes up, but the other big pushbutton user, AMC, had dropped them as well.
“Muscle memory”.: My dad’s 64 Galaxie XL had a floor mounted selector for the slushbox. Dad kept hitting the front center of the seat in his 69 Fury with his hand for months, until he got used to a column gear selector.
Did Packard have the first push button transmission?
Besides MOPARS, there were buttons on Edsels & Packards.
I have been driving various push-button Darts and Valiants continuously since 1986, 1) i don’t find it un-intuitive (on the dart-valiant setup, anyway), 2) The buttons are way better for shifting on the fly over of any column-mounted shifter I have, because you push and you are shifted), 3) it’s way easier to rock a car out of snow with the buttons than with a lever in a PRNDL layout because you just hit the top and bottom buttons rhythmically and you don’t even let up on the gas (tho’ PNDLR lever set ups on my Studebakers were good for easy rocking too).
Perhaps its memory, but I don’t need to look at the buttons, you quickly hit the button and, especially for downshifting from drive to 2nd: the buttons are easier to get right than the column shifter, and better than the kick-down under your accelerator, because you just immediately shift, and especially if you have any kind of carburetor/advance issues that the sudden flood from the accelerator pump might accentuate.
Finally — with respect to safety, notice there is no standardization anymore with regards to shift-device/method. So did different patterns really contribute to accidents in 1964? Fords have gone to a knob, Toyota has that weird shifty lever in the Prius, consoles in the SUVs. You’ve got paddle shifters below the steering wheel all over the place, and every other permutation known to man.
Consumer’s reports is worried about this non-standardization and now reports on shifters they think are dangerous. The only completely dangerous shifter I ever encountered was the manual gearbox in the Datsun B210, where reverse was right where 1st should have been, and nothing stopped you from shifting into it. And the Peugeot 4-spd column shift in the 404 was weird, but you only ended up in 2nd if you forgot first was pull forward and down . At least reverse was push-down and down (or was it up?), so you really had to work to get there.
Here’s to differentiation!
The 5sp dog leg manual trans used in the B210 was weird but when it left the factory it had a back up beeper that came on inside the car when you put it in reverse. My friend had one for many years.
If I remember correctly, a few AMC products had push buttons late 50’s/early 60’s, as did ’57-58 Mercurys. Not sure about the last Nash and Hudsons, but something has me wanting to claim they used them, too.
Also, Renault Dauphine, if you got the automatic (first car I ever drove, age 13), and I think the R8 and R10’s, too.
AMC and Ford both bought automatic transmissions from Borg Warner and General Motors. For 1956 Lincoln switched from H-M to its own Turbo-Drive (aka B-W, only now built by Ford). And Ford began building more automatic transmissions for their own use.
The 1957 Mercury and Monarch (CDN) adopted push buttons as an option with the buttons on the left side bottom edge of the instrument panel. The Monarch was dropped for 1958 (only) and the new Edsel adopted push button controls. Buttons were gone on the 1959 Ford Motor Co. models.
The six cylinder 1955-56 Hudsons (Wasp) and Nashes (Statesman) used GM’s Dual-Range Hydra-matic while the Packard-built V8 models (Hornet and Ambassador) used Packard’s Twin-Ultramatic.
Mid-1956 saw a new 250-cid AMC-built V8, coupled to GM’s Hydra-Matic used on what initially were to be Wasp and Statesman models.
The Packard engine was replaced by AMC’s 327-cid V8 for the 1957 Hornet and Ambassador, coupled to Hydra-Matic. B-W supplied transmissions for the Rambler models.
Buttons were offered on the 1958 Rambler, 6 and V8, using Borg-Warner automatics (Flash-O-Matic). 1962 was the last year AMC used transmission buttons.
AMC used B-W automatics (Flash-O-Matic) through 1971, switching to Chrysler’s Torqueflite (Torque-Command).
That 5 speed pattern was used by Porsche and Alfa and most sporty cars back in the day. And there was a reason: 5th was not overdrive in them, so for sporty/racing driving, one only ever used first once, when starting out, but gears 2-5 were the ones used the most at speed, so they wanted as many direct shifts (no dog leg) as possible. Racers always preferred this pattern.
Only when 5th gears became common after the energy crisis as gas-saving overdrives did the more modern shift pattern become the norm.
Only the early Peugeot 404s had that weird pattern; my ’68 had a normal one. That older pattern really threw me the first time I tried to drive an older 404; WTF?? I was totally flummoxed, until I figured it out.
Yes, booby-trap automatic shift quadrants caused crashes, injuries, and deaths. Read this book, by this man, who has a legitimate claim to the title of “Father of the Automatic Transmission”. He tirelessly railed—with rigourous data on his side—against automatic shift quadrants with adjacent reverse and forward drive positions. For it, he got mocked by officials, scorned by officials, and shunned by SAE.
Honda Odyssey just went to pushbutton shifting.
Great piece! I’ve always wondered about this matter.
GMC Terrain has pushbutton shifting too, with a twist. You pull on the Drive and Reverse buttons to activate them, you push on Park and the others. Maybe easier to do without looking?
As a kid growing up in San Antionio, TX I remember a high school buddy buying an ex-San Antonio police car at auction. It was either an early ’60’s Plymouth or Dodge black and white with automatic. The push button panel for gear selection had the “first” and “second” gear buttons removed and blanked off. Just Reverse, Neutral, and Drive. The word on the street was that cops were wearing out transmissions by shifting up and down the foreward gears using the buttons. Not sure if this was a factory mod or a local fix but after checking out several in service police cars at the time it looked like they were all modified that way.
This sounds very plausible, particularly when one considers that, supposedly, drag-racers liked the Mopars with the push-button shifter. It was the one area where the push-button shifter was preferred over lever selection.
But for everyday driving, I agree with most others that the push-button automatic was just a holdover gimmick from the fifties and Lynn Townsend was correct in getting rid of it. It was just one more thing that tended to keep a Ford or GM owner from switching to a Chrysler product.
When Chrysler introduced push button shifting in 1956, they were simply participating in that goofy, optimistic, space-age “all drudgery will be banished with modern, push button convenience” promise rift in the consumer products industry of that silly decade. Whether automatic washers, televisions, radios, etc., all our laborious problems would soon be handled by unseen ‘robots’ doing the hard, dirty work. The idea that one would buy a certain car make over another because of such a gimmick was absurd, but such were the times.
By the mid-’60’s, market research had discovered the distaste GM and Ford buyers held for the Mopar push button shifter. ChryCo, with falling market share, could hardly afford any detail that would discourage a potential customer from considering their cars. The government specifications may have helped the decision along to change but the pragmatic reasoning was the major force.
Consider also that while the government bought Mopar fleet cars, they were still a small percentage of overall corporate sales. Typically fleet sales returned low unit profit per car, so little cause to make too much of an effort to conform for relative peanuts made on each fleet sale.
Fleet sales are not as bad for the mfg as everyone makes them out to be. A fleet sale of the magnitude of the federal gov’t is significant and especially for small share Chrysler. Also if the GSA took them off the list there is always the risk that state and local agencies could follow their lead.
Total sales are a big part of the total true cost of the car. One of the pieces of the total cost of the car is amortization of development costs and tooling. The fewer cars you sell the more each one costs. So as long as you are covering the amortization and variable costs selling one “at cost” prevents lowering the profit on the others.
The labor side is another consideration. A plant is designed to crank out a certain number of cars per day and all those hourly union works expect to get a full pay check every week. Thanks to the strength of the unions at the time sending home workers w/o pay is a very slippery slope. So is it better to pay them to make a car that will have little profit or to pay them not to make a car and guarantee a loss?
Also with big contract like you would see with the GSA it is often for delivery at a future date or future dates. So if the retail orders are low one week crank out more of those fleet vehicles that are due for delivery in the future. Then when that retail advertising blitz and special package deals do cause retail sales to pick up next week adjust accordingly.
While the Chrysler of the early 70’s was not necessarily the same as in the early 60’s their aversion to sending workers home came back to roost in the wake of the first energy crisis. With few orders coming in they kept running the lines at speed and putting cars in the “sales bank”. Then they had people trying to sell those bank cars to dealers, usually at a discount. Then to get them off the dealer’s lot the came out with the rebates.
Supplier contracts are another concern, many times the price is dependent on the size of the order and if you’ve committed to a certain number you are going to want to use them all. Chrysler gave us the re-birth of the Dodge Monaco in an attempt to use up all the engines that were on the hook for, the Eagle Premier that wasn’t cutting it on its own.
Sometimes in business you are forced to make the decision on which path will result in lower losses, or which path leads you to a break even.
Fleet sales are not all created equal. Government and private fleets are very lucrative business. Rental fleets, on the other hand, can kill a brand’s resale if not managed very carefully.
“Thanks to the strength of the unions at the time sending home workers w/o pay is a very slippery slope. So is it better to pay them to make a car that will have little profit or to pay them not to make a car and guarantee a loss?”
I’m pretty sure UAW contracts by this point had the stipulation that workers sent home for lack of work *still were paid 80 percent of their standard wage*. That provision is a big part of why GM and Ford had such trouble managing inventory through the ’80s and ’90s and even into the 2000s, and it’s part of why GM kept some of their loser products around. It was cheaper for them to build the cars and sell for some profit than it was to shut the lines down and then STILL pay 80 percent of their labor costs anyway.
That provision was one of the major sticking points in 2007, and at least Ford considered it a major victory when they got that out of the contract. That was also a major component of Ford being able to manage production correctly and cut lines as needed.
Yup the corporation would be better off paying the worker $100 even though they know they will only recoup $75 from his work and thus loosing $25 instead of paying the worker $80 to not work and loosing $80.
Compliance with the PRNDL shift pattern might have been the final nail in Studebaker coffin. They stopped production just weeks before the April 26, 1966 deadline.
Studebaker was Canadian, so was never likely to sell to the US Government anyway.
The story I have heard as to what caused Studebaker production to end when it did is that the
sole die for stamping trunk lids broke. Maybe this can be the subject of our next investigative piece. 🙂
My thought was that Studebaker used Borg Warner transmissions and possibly their compliance would dictate that Studebaker would have to make changes that they were not willing to make. The board of directors wanted out of the car business so it wouldn’t have taken much of an excuse to end production.
My thought was that Borg Warner, who supplied Stude with transmissions likely would comply with the requirement forcing Studebaker to make changes weather they wanted to or not. The board of directors wanted Studebaker out of the car business so they wouldn’t have needed much of an excuse to shut down.
One of the worst offenders re standardization of transmission quadrants was Buick. For example, in 1959 if you had the Triple Turbine you got a quadrant with R next to P but if your second car was another 59 Buick with the Twin Turbine you got a quadrant with R at the bottom in old GM style. Pretty dangerous if switched back and forth between them.
Twin Turbine quadrant:
Yeah, that was a weird thing. Interestingly, a year after Chevrolet introduced Turboglide, which had the same PRNDG pattern as Triple Turbine, they redesigned the hydraulic controls of Powerglide so that it would be PRNDL rather than PNDLR.
I drove my aunt’s 64 Dart with pushbutton Torequeflite back in high school. I didn’t much care for the controls but don’t remember them being a problem. OTOH a co-worker at my high school employment had a 64 big Dodge. I remember the D button jamming one night – she could not get it into R to back out of space. IIRC a local mechanic came over, took off the face plate, and managed to get the buttons working again.
My great uncle kept their 55 DeSoto with the little wand on the dash transmission selector for ten years, in part because he did not want a Mopar product with the push buttons. When Chrysler went back to the column selector, he bought a new 65 Newport. Just one consumer but I’m sure there were many others who preferred the conventional control.
I’ve driven a few pushbutton cars, Mopar and AMC. No problems and I rather liked it. The ‘ 62 rambler Classic doubled the N button as the starter button. It used a vacuum switch to prevent starter operation once the engine was running. I currently have a ’62 Dodge D-200 truck with a pushbutton shifter. There is no park position or lever. One must use the parking brake. The pushbutton craze was huge in the late 50’s, look almost any consumer product from then. Radios, stoves, washing machines and so on.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 2015, Lincoln implicitly decreed: Suddenly, it’s 1958! That was the year Ford effed up pushbutton automatic transmission controls for their first time. It was on the Edsel, and unlike Chrysler’s simple, dependable bowden-cable system, the Ford arrangement was a crapmess of solenoids, wires and switches that didn’t stay working and didn’t stay fixed.
Flash forward to 2015, and just lookit the fresh, new crapmess Ford put together: they had to recall the Lincoln MKC because they put the engine stop/start button right next to one of the gear buttons, so drivers trying to select a gear found themselves stopping the engine by mistake. On a scale of 1 to 10, wherein 1 is “couldn’t nobody foresee this” and 10 is “as predictable as finding flour amongst the ingredients of white bread”, this piece of idiocy ranks 79. The recall was surely expensive, and it absolutely didn’t have to happen.
Engine stop/start buttons sure seem to cause a whole lot more problems than turn-the-key type ignition switches. I wonder if it might have something to do with their being the answer to a question nobody asked.
I personally am a big fan of push-button start, and Lincoln’s stupidity aside I haven’t heard of any problems with them. One of the things I miss most about my Fiesta ST is not having to mess around fishing the keys out of my pocket. Just smack the button and go.
I mean, there’s no dignified way to dig keys out of a pocket or purse. None. Stone-cold sober in a tux and you’ll still look like a drunken moron trying to get the keys from your pocket the instant they catch a loose thread or just a bit of extra fabric.
What I find fascinating, and what you get at with your comment, is that we’ve suddenly lost the standardization of automatic shifters we had for 50 years. We had a thing coming out the floor console or a thing coming out the column. That was it.
Now, we have push buttons all over again (Lincoln). We have goofy joystick things (Prius, BMW, Buick). We have older-style floor console shifters (numerous). We have rotary knobs, and in several different varieties.
And worst of all, we had the Chrysler/Jeep thing that looked like an older-style floor console shifter but didn’t work like one and didn’t like to catch Park unless you held it long enough or bounced it several times. That one literally killed people (Anton Yelchin).
I’m hesitant to say the government should set a standard, since they’ve held the U.S. back in terms of headlight development and the like. But, I think the current crop of designers need to have their ears boxed a couple times for being stupid.
No? See here.
No objection to a twist knob with accessory, off, run, and start positions. It could sit there useless on the dash or in the centre console until the person with the right transponder fob in pocket or purse—or the hacker, I suppose—is sitting in the driving seat. But a single push-to-start, push-to-stop button is very much the wrong way to do it.
Does any carmaker still manufacture vehicles with the automatic transmission column shift like my old Falcon and now-sold ’67 Lincoln did? I’ve not been in many late-model vehicles and I’ve wondered about that. Of all the various types of auto transmissions listed above I didn’t notice any column-shifted vehicle models.
I cannot remember what kind of automatic transmission was in the 1986 Thunderbird I inherited from my Dad. I only remember the dashboard was digital.
Well the Police Interceptor Sedan version of the Taurus has a column shift as does the Utility. Of course the retail versions of those vehicles have console shifters. So there may be no more retail grade cars with a column shifter.
That of course is done so that there is room to mount police equipment.
As far as I know, GM and Ford still offer column shifters in their pickups, usually in the lower-trim versions.
Two things, one, you could push the “R” button halfway in and turn on the back up lights without shifting…great for tailgaters on the highway. Second, it was hard to change gears quickly if you were road racing your dad’s ’64 Dart through Loch Raven reservoir on Saturday night.
Lots of comments here!
The ’58 Mercury had a unique pushbutton setup. Was it mechanical or electrical like the Edsel? There were two versions: the one pictured, and one with two drive buttons, CRUISING RANGE and HIGH PERFORMANCE RANGE (sort of like D2 and D1).
There’s an Edsel promo film on YouTube which shows test drivers shifting the Teletouch buttons with a toothpick! That’s a big advantage I’m missing out on!
The more deluxe version:
Never saw these before. They’re the coolest!
A better picture of the Multi-Drive version:
These also were electric, like Edsel and Packard.
I checked the ’58 Mercury brochure. In the interest of accuracy, it says “Mechanical”. Same for ’57.
In 1973 I had a job as a stock boy in a local drug store. One Saturday the delivery guy called out sick, and the boss told me to run the deliveries. Problem was that I was 16 and didn’t have my license yet, had very little seat time, and had never even been in a car by myself before. Unperturbed by these trivialities, he handed me the keys and the deliveries. I went out to the Valiant with the push button shift and away I go. As I began to get used to it I would volunteer to do deliveries as it got me out of the store. As soon as I exited the parking lot I would twist one up, pick up a buddy and practice neutral drops. In many ways, my first car.
I drove a 1963 Plymouth, with push buttons, every day for nearly two years and don’t recall having any problems with the setup. Actually, for the 18 year old me, the push buttons made manual shifting of the automatic much easier; it was a lot simpler (for me) to push the appropriate button rather than dealing with the floppy shifter that GM and Ford products used. With a little practice I was able to spin the back tires on the one-two shift; one simply pushed the “Two” button while simultaneously letting off the accelerator and then slamming it to the floor. It is somewhat ironic that nearly fifty years ago I (and many of my contemporaries) tried our best to replicate manual shifting with automatic transmissions that were basically intended to just be left in “Drive”. Today, when most automatics, at least in theory, can be shifted manually I just put them in “Drive” and let the electronics do its thing.
For a final word on the prevalence of pushbuttons in the culture at large, I used Google Ngrams to see how frequently the word “pushbutton” appeared in English-language books and magazines.
As expected it rockets up in popularity from the 1920s up to about 1963. But then it underwent a significant drop down at about 1968. Just as we’ve posited here, pushbuttons were cool everywhere in the fifties, but not so cool as the sixties wore on.
Pushbuttons rose again in the seventies, as digital chips turned knobs into buttons seemingly everywhere. Then an even steeper drop in the late nineties as mouse clicks took over.
Not surprising, Mike. The house I grew up in was built in 1959 and our counter top range had pushbutton controls. I never realized until later how not normal these were.
It is odd, given your chart, that pushbutton telephones began to replace the dial type during pushbuttons waning everywhere else.
Not terribly odd. Touch-tone was first shown to the public at the 1962 (Seattle) World’s Fair, which means it was under development in the mid-’50s—number one. Number two, once the constraint imposed by the need for pulse dialling was removed, pushbuttons were the logical kind of control for the task. They still are; take a look at your nearest phone.
At the height of the pushbutton fad, a great number of things were controlled by pushbuttons that probably shouldn’t’ve been—but pushbuttons are the right kind of control in some cases, fad or no fad.
As to the pushbutton cooktop: those remained very popular well after the pushbutton fad in general faded away. I grew up in a house built in ’67 and equipped by its first owner—a General Electric executive—with GE’s top-of-the-line appliances. These included a cooktop with pushbuttons similar to the ones shown in JPC’s picture (except they were located at eye height on the front panel of the matching vent hood) and an intercom system fairly bristling with pushbuttons. Ditto for the washer and dryer, and the dishwasher—all ’67 models—and GE kept those pushbuttons on their top-line dishwashers and dryers well into the ’80s.
I bought a Maytag dishwasher in the early ’90s and it still used mechanical pushbuttons for all its controls; it was the second to top-of-the-line model. The actual top-line model replaced the buttons with an electronic touchpad and display. Higher-end KitchenAid dishwashers also retained mechanical pushbuttons well into the ’90s. Another lost feature from both of those brands: a tub made of blue and white porcelain, rather than the plastic (low-end) or stainless steel (mid- to high-end) interiors used today. Other than being heavy, I’m not sure what was wrong with porcelain, but nobody uses porcelain tubs in dishwashers anymore.
I forgot all about those GE range hoods with the stove/cooktop controls on them. That’s one way to make sure customers choose GE for both parts! It also made it difficult for kids to play with the controls, which was probably its main appeal.
Adopting pushbuttons on phones even after the downfall of the pushbutton-everything craze made sense because it conferred a genuine advantage – allowing considerably faster dialing than with a rotary dial, as well as (in the future) enabling sending signals to answering machines and voicemail.
Very interesting chart. I wonder how much of the recent decline in the usage of “pushbutton” is also attributable to pushbuttons being called something else — like “touch controls.” Kind of like reinventing the wheel — “touch controls” seems technologically cutting-edge, while what it really refers to are buttons.
Well this discussion of pushbuttons isn’t complete without mentioning The Jetson’s episode in which wife Jane sits at home, pushing buttons all day which control various housecleaning robots. She gets a repetitive stress injury from doing this, and comes back from the doctor with a diagnosis of “buttonitis”!
Talks about life imitating art!
I believe Renault had pushbutton controls on their Automatics back in the ’60s – the R8 or R10 or both? So they would have been the last pushbutton cars available in the US after ’65. But gone by about ’72.
Incidentally, which was the last pushbutton automatic ever? (Hint: it was not available in the US nor Western Europe)…
Those government rules about gearshifts must have changed or there are many cars they won’t buy now! All manufacturers seem to have their individual ways of gearshifts for automatics now. Paddles seem to be the only thing every auto trans car has these days. I wonder why the fascination with paddles – how often does anyone actually use them? My last 3 cars have had them. Each time I use them when I first get the car and after just a few days I don’t bother again.
I have quite a few different shifting set ups in my home fleet. Two conventional column shifts, two conventional center console shifters. My ’96 and ’07 Mustangs have the conventional automatic layout. My ’97 Jag has the console “J shifter.” I prefer this set up to the Mustangs because I can pull it straight back into drive after starting up. I rarely shift it manually. I don’t like the rotary control shifter that the newer Jags have. I guess they have additional paddle shifters. I haven’t started driving my ’89 XJS a lot at this point, but it has that tiny little automatic shift lever on the console. It’s pretty, but It’s not very easy to navigate. My old project, not yet running, Jag has a conventional floor shift four speed.
I have several different shift controls in my current fleet:
Two conventional column shift automatics.
Two conventional console shift automatics.
One Jaguar “J gate” console shift. (My favorite)
One tiny willowy Jaguar console shift on my XJS. Conventional shift pattern.
One “four on the floor” in my ’51 Jag Mark VII. (Not yet in service)
I generally do not manually shift my automatics, I use the “passing gear kickdown” when needed. I will manually switch out of overdrive, or downshift to a lower gear while going down steep downhill runs.
I know a lot of sporty drivers will down shift manually when going through a series of tight turns, as sometimes the transmission will uphsift and move you out of the powerband while you are exiting the turn. Modern cars can handle this. A Jaguar service mechanic advised me not to regularly downshift the XJS manually for braking entering turns, as the Turbo 400 wasn’t designed for that. He said that it would cause the second gear clutch to wear out prematurely. That’s the same basic transmission that I had in most of my Cadillacs, where I found it was pretty long lived. But then I wasn’t hooning around the backroads in my Coupe de Villes!
We had some limousines in Soviet Union in the 50s19 to then 60s they were push buttons to shift. They were to left and high on the dash, close to the door. There were NOT model year like here, just revisions as needed unless entire new model introduced. I left for Asia in 1964 and return in 1973 to find cars completely different. I remember corvair (I think) had a starnage mechanism, was like heater controls
Chrysler’s decision to drop the buttons had nothing to do with the law of August, 1964. How could it? The 1965 models were approved for production in 1963 and then were in production by the summer of 1964. All BEFORE August, 1964.
As well, the list of standards had to be prepared within one year of the passing of the bill, and would be in force 90 days after the list was published and distributed. Which pushes the dates further – completion and published in January 26, 1965. 90 days from January 26, 1965 is April 16, 1965. But that date would not be known to anyone prior to January 26, 1965.
So, why did Chrysler kill the buttons? Sales – or rather sales resistance. Packard (1956), Mercury (1957-58), Edsel (1958), and Rambler (1958-1962) all had pushbutton transmissions. For 1963 Rambler dropped their buttons and replaced them with a lever. Which left Chrysler all to itself with buttons in North America.
Chrysler used to push their buttons as a great idea. And Chrysler owners tended to agree that they were great. But owners of Ford and GM products wondered if they are so great, why is only Chrysler using them? And this is what Chrysler management was taking into consideration. If prospective buyers are looking at our cars, seeing the buttons, and walking away, may be something should change?
Thus sometime before the 1965 models were approved for production, the decision was made to drop the buttons,.
The odd thing about Rambler is the American always had a shift lever, only Rambler and Ambassador had push buttons. I had a ’64 Dodge at one time and I liked the push buttons. Never had any problems with them.
Chrysler’s decision to drop the buttons had nothing to do with the law of August, 1964. How could it? The 1965 models were approved for production in 1963 and then were in production by the summer of 1964.
As well, the list of standards had to be prepared, published and distributed. The regulations came into effect April 16, 1966. Thus these regulations had absolutely no effect on the 1965 models of any manufacturer.
So, why did Chrysler kill the buttons? Sales – or rather sales resistance. Packard (1956), Mercury (1957-58), Edsel (1958), and Rambler (1958-1962) all had pushbutton transmissions. For 1963 Rambler dropped their buttons and replaced them with a lever. Which left Chrysler all to itself with buttons in North America.
Chrysler used to push their buttons as a great idea. And Chrysler owners tended to agree that they were great. But owners of Ford and GM products wondered if they are so great, why is only Chrysler using them? And this is what Chrysler management was taking into consideration. If prospective buyers are looking at our cars, seeing the buttons, and walking away, may be something should change?
The real reason was the Crysler push-button transmission was dangerous. Any child could climb in the car and push the buttons and away the car went if they were on any kind of incline. I know because I did that when I was 4 years old in 1964 with my 2-year-old brother in the car, our parents new Chrysler. I just started punching buttons and away we went. He smacked his head against the windshield when we finally came to a stop by running into a tree. It was a terrifying experience. Ford and GM knew kids could do that and were much smarter than Crysler. I believe the Crysler push-button transmission was one of the most dangerous things a car maker ever did.
I did exactly the same thing at that age to the three-speed column shift in our ’55 Studebaker. I was pretend driving and bumped the lever out of first. It started rolling down the driveway. In a panic I somehow got it back into some gear and it stopped. Never heard a word about it from my folks, so I think I got away with it.
Anyway, this could happen to any mechanically operated transmission. As a driver I’ve always made sure to set the parking brake.
Hyundai has begun using an electric push button selector on many of their 2020 and newer vehicles. My own 2021 Sonata has this “new style” selector (picture attached) and quite frankly its the only thing about this car I HATE.
You cannot select a D or R without pressing the brake. Which makes 3 point quick turn around tedious as you have to look down for the correct direction and press the brake too.
On a few occasions I’ve pressed Park but the damn thing didn’t go into park and continued to move when I thought it was in park.
Push button is dangerous!
No way was the American government involved in Chrysler dumping their transmission push buttons. Chrysler and Packard adopted buttons in 1956, while Mercury joined the group in 1957 and finally Edsel and Rambler in 1958. The transmissions in the 1957-58 Mercury, 1958 Edsel and 1958-1962 Ramblers were all supplied by Borg Warner.
When the 1963 models were introduced in the fall of 1962 only Chrysler Corp. had the buttons. Should also point out that Park was not a button on Chrysler cars, but a lever. You could push the Park “button” all you wanted, but nothing would happen. You had to move the lever.
Chrysler president Lynn Townsend was pushing Chrysler to gain a higher percentage of the markets it was involved in – United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, etc. And, as stated, by 1963 Chrysler was the only company into push button transmissions.
When the prospective car buyer looked at all the cars at car shows and saw buttons only on Chrysler products, the main comment was – what’s wrong with the transmission buttons? Why is Chrysler now the only company offering buttons? Are they not safe?
During this period, Chrysler was interviewing car owners and prospective owners about what they wanted in a car and what they didn’t want. And push buttons were not getting much support. Present owners at the time generally loved them, but that would not help sell more cars.
Thus the move by Chrysler to drop the buttons. If they wanted to sell more cars, the buttons had to go.
As for the government, they had no power to do anything in the auto industry prior to 1965. In the summer of 1965 the US Congress passed two laws, National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act. The two were enacted in 1966 along with the establishment of the Department of Transportation.
The DoT now had the power to set safety and emission standards for all vehicles sold in the U.S.A. The first standards were set to go ahead for the 1969 model year.
American auto makers had made exterior driver’s mirror, front seat belts, heaters, among other items, standard for the 1965 model year. The U.,S. government could not tell the US automakers to make equipment standard for the 1965 model year, but the Automobile Manufacturers Association could. And did. Which is also why non-American manufacturers, eg. Japanese, did not. The AMA had no power over non-American built vehicles.
And the results for the 1965 model year? Chrysler increased from 1,130,020 in 1964 to 1,441,198 in 1965. Which meant Chrysler Corp’s market share increased from 14.5% to 16.3% in1965. Chrysler hit a peak with the 1968 models – 18.9%.
My parents had a 1958 Plymouth with a push-button transmission. After having it repaired twice, my dad said never again.
That was probably more a function of the car being a poorly-built ’58 Chrysler product, rather than anything inherent to pushbutton transmission control.
The push button mechanism was exceptionally reliable. From what I’ve read there is no mystery as to why Chrysler got rid of it. Most other makes had gone to steering wheel or console lever shifter and as a result the upcoming federal safety regs would likely make that the standard, if any were made a standard. I think another factor was the addition of a PARK position. With the pushbutton shifter adding PARK required adding an additional lever and an additional cable… that spells $$$$. So they threw in the towel. And honestly as much as I love the pushbuttons the steering wheel or console shifter is much easier to use without even looking.
A very late comment. Owned a ’58 Plymouth in the mid-70s. Being young and single at the time, I always appreciated the ability to keep my arm around a date while shifting the car. It was an under appreciated feature that was topped only by a ’60 Valiant I owned.
The Valiant had a bench seat and a 3 speed floor shifter. On dates in that car, I always tried to work by hand in between my dates legs to shift. Ended up getting slapped more than a few times, but sometimes luck was with me.
I wonder why car testers never rated such features.
Joe Gutts (Science & Mechanics) and Tom McCahill (Mechanix Illustrated) happily gloated about the behaviour they inflicted upon women.
My memory is that there were two reactions to the push-button transmissions of Chrysler Corporation. The dumb people went “Wow, wow!” The smart ones went “So what?” And when they disappeared I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that they’d been an annoying service problem over time. But in those days there were oodles of silly features on cars that were nothing but attention getting devices, like Chrysler’s swivel seats, those automatic headlight dimmers (which dimmed or did not dim according to their moods) and other nonsense. The wraparound windshields were very silly and were gradually “unwrappedaround” by the early 1960s. Sorry if I lack enthusiasm for the push buttons.
I’m amused by this 1960 Ford advertisement, which (at 1:16) brags about “no dogleg here!” Just a few years after they touted the new wraparound windshields, they touted the new non-wraparound windshields (once buyers realized that feature also meant whacking their knees against the dogleg in the A pillar necessary to accommodate it). I suspect it was a similar situation with pushbutton transmissions – people learned it took more effort and careful aim to shift them than conventional levers required.
It could be interesting to wonder whay if Chrysler never adopted the pushbutton automatic transmission?
Sorry for the typo, it’s “what if and not “whay if”. ^_^;;
I don’t see standardization as being bad. Much of it happened as a result of consumer preference/ rejection, not government intrusion (though there are those who still like to blame the government for anything they don’t like).
Nobody speculated that the change was made for any reason other than government fleet purchasing rules back when the people who made the decisions and executed the changeover were still around talking about it.
It’s obvious to me that the US government didn’t ban push-button automatic transmissions, since several recent vehicles such as the Lincoln Navigator pictured below use them. Only the order (PRNDL) is mandated, not what type of interface – and we’ve had many (column levers, console shifters, “monostable” console shifters or dashboard nubs that return to the central position after a gear is selected, J-gates, buttons, touchscreens).
I’m guessing Lynn Townsend or one of his underlings issued the edict to ditch the buttons, as Townsend clearly wanted the “weirdness” removed from Chrysler’s cars, be it toilet-seat trunk lids, oddball fender contours, funky headlamp treatments, googie-styled dashboards… or southpaw pushbuttons controlling the transmission.
I came across this good overview of pushbutton automatic transmissions – never knew AMC had one! https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/the-motor-citys-push-button-age/
My first car had a pushbutton automatic transmission and the reason I ended up paying only $200 for my Plymouth Valiant was because the push button transmission broke the reverse band in the transmission.
It was a fragile contraption. After the transmission fix, I was told to never go from reverse to drive unless the car was completely stopped. My brother, however, used to do neutral drops after I sold him the car. He just couldn’t seem to break it.
Ford also recommended going from reverse – to neutral – to drive on their push button Edsels, Fords and Mercurys. That teletouch steering hub required caution.
I just believe that the technology wasn’t robust enough to keep the push button in production. I always shifted by Valiant very carefully.
It wasn’t just the buttons – I broke a reverse band in the transmission of my 6 cyl 71 Scamp. I was trying to rock it out of a snowbank and after a few successful back and forth cycles, I heard a bang and there was no more reverse. I think that one cost me about $350 around 1982.
The TorqueFlight was never known as a fragile transmission but yes, abusing the reverse band can snap them. It has nothing to do with it being a “push button” transmission, there’s nothing different about the transmission because it uses pushbuttons to move the shift cable. The pushbutton shifter was not fragile either, they are amazingly durable. There is really only one drawback to them and that is there is no way to get enough cable movement out of the amount any one pushbutton moves when you push it. That is why they had to add the little “Park” lever to them when they needed to add a park position. I believe that, combined with “market forces” is why Chrysler thru in the towel and went to the column shift… the column shift is easy to set up with the needed range of motion to engage Park. But as far as robustness, the original pushbutton shifter was plenty robust. The one on my 1960 dodge still worked like new.
As to the Ford version of pushbuttons… Fords was electric and used a complicated positioning motor to do the shifting down on the transmission. The motor had difficulty making the movement from Park to Drive in one single motion for some reason, so they told people to shift to neutral first and then to drive. It’s a bit like how finicky those T-bird Convertible top mechanisms are, it’s a dance and everything must be perfectly timed, or things go wrong.
I was driving my 62 Dodge D200 with the pushbutton automatic today. The truck used an earlier car quadrant. No park position either. Good solid transmission, it will bark the tires going into second if asked. Stock poly 318 out front. N
R. D
1 2
I always figured it was because of how my friend Chris and I in our button-pushing frenzy managed to roll his dad’s 1965 Polara down the hill into the garage door.
On GSA rules consider this. It’s easy to adjust to quirky cars if you drive the same one every day. The brain gets used to “normal”. But if you have people driving whatever on different days or even different times of the same day, standardization starts to make more sense. What becomes intuitive after a day or two, might be less so if you’re driving whatever is available out of the fleet. Analytics then what they are now, but it’s not saying there wasn’t someone who noticed certain cars repeatedly had certain problems and tried to minimize that. Dunno if this was the case, but it might have been.
On the pushbutton shifters themselves. I’ve done a little side work over the years on cars, one of the first was a tranny replacement on a ’64 Imperial back around 73-74. Heavy beast of a car, heavy beast of a transmission, but I finally got it in. No start, but I figured out quickly it was the neutral safety switch, although I probably didn’t know what it was called in those days. Finally got it started in I don’t know what, but I only recall one cable that operated it. OK, I’ve slept once or twice since then, but I swear I only had to deal with one cable. And yes I did adjust it so it worked like it should.
Some authors say Townsend was responding to school drivers ed teachers, who wanted the kids to learn on the most common style of car and rejected “oddball” controls. I don’t know if this is true…
A friend had a 1960ish Rambler with a push-button transmission that the buttons became wouldn’t shift one night when it was -10F. He didn’t know what to do but seemed to think the problem was a stickiness around the buttons and not in the cable or the transmission. He then sprayed some starting fluid allaround the buttons. It did loosen up the buttons, but thinking about it now, it’s amazing we weren’t blown sky high. Good thing none of us were smokers!
I spent a number of years pushing those buttons. My family’s second car in the latter 60’s was a ’60 Fury wagon. That was my main source of transportation when I started driving for a couple of years. The other was a ’59 DeSoto Firedome I bought in the early 70’s. I did about 60k mi. in two years in that one. I don’t think that the ’59 Desoto had a “Park” feature at all.
I don’t recall any problems with the button system on either car. Both of those models had many problems with the double wheel cylinder front brakes.
My dad’s prior Chrysler product cars were a ’46 Plymouth and a ’56 Plymouth and were both manual trans.
The only time I had ever seen a push button transmission was in my father’s 1960 Dodge Dart that he had for a few months. Being five years old my only interest was in pushing the buttons. Then a few days ago a 62 Dodge showed up for sale fairly near me in good grade 3- condition. However, I just can’t get past the front of the car no matter how hard I try.
Broken exhaust bolts/studs in FE cylinder heads. I love FE engines but there are a few things that need attention.
Started a story on it but have since been denied access to finishing the story. So you don’t worry about those heads here they are with all new valves, rockers, shafts, springs, etc. Yes, those upper exhaust bolts were fun which is why I took the heads off to deal with that cracked exhaust manifold. I soaked and used a torch and was 5 out of 8. Engine is on stand with crank coming out tomorrow.
Not bad for 154,000 mi.
What FE is this and what is it going into?
You mean what did it come out from? The car has been seen before here but maybe not again. A few personal emails have asked me what the holdup is and they know. Oh, and I took up Aaron65s suggestion to replace the valve seals on the heads…
tbm3fan: I’ve left numerous comments about the fact that you do not answer our emails and we do not receive your emails. There’s obviously something wrong with your email process or provider.
If you continue to make accusations or berate us for something that is completely out of our hands, you may also lose your commenting privileges.
My service provider is Comcast. I got your test email and replied to it and sent another 3 days later. No reply to either one yet I get other people’s emails just fine. Your address is right as the mail daemon has never sent anything back. I find it strange that only Curbside has trouble since we have conversed over email several times before a few years ago.
So what I will go is now send four emails through four different addresses and see what happens. Gmail, PacBell, Hotmail, and Astound.
Your #4 email just arrived. It’s the first one in a very long time. Did you get my reply?
Later on the Feds also tackled standardizing controls on motorcycles.
My 1st – 1970 Kawasaki 500 triple – shift on left side, neutral down, 1 thru 5 up, nice for getting to neutral, just keeping banging down until you get there.
My 2nd – 1973 Moto Guzzi V7 Sport – shift on RIGHT side, neutral between 1st & 2nd, 1st is up, 2nd thru 5th is down, good luck finding neutral in a hurry, just make sure the neutral light is on and slowly release the clutch.
My 3rd – 1982 Harley-Davidson – shift on left side, neutral between 1st & 2nd, 1st is down, 2nd thru 5th is up, good luck finding neutral in a hurry, and slowly release the clutch.
So three different shift patterns and running in different directions and on opposite sides AND that means the rear brake control has also swapped side.
This was a thinking mans game to own and ride these bikes at the same time.
The first Allison World transmissions we bought in the early 90’s had push button controls. After we got a few years in, probably 150 units out of a fleet of 850, we started getting complaints that the buttons couldn’t be pushed with heavier gloves on, you had to look at the control of feel around for the buttons. Switched to a T handle shift lever.
As much as I loved the pushbuttons for style, the column shifter (or a T handle) is far more ergonomic to use.
In late 1963 my folks were looking at new cars and I really liked the ’64 Dodges with of course the push button trans.
They looked at other cars but came back to Dodge later and ended up with a ’65 Polara. A great car, but boy was I disappointed when it came with the lever set trans.