Shifting expectations

SINCE 1930, Daimler had been doing its level best to rid the driver of the necessity of changing their own gears. Indeed, from 1930 to the mid-Fifties it had sought to do away with the tiresome job of swapping cogs with the use of the Wilson pre-selector gearbox and a fluid flywheel. You would select your gear from a dash quadrant, rapidly depress and re-engage a pedal in place of a clutch, and the fluid flywheel would transmit drive in much the same manner as it does with today’s autos. No clutch, no lurching, it did almost everything for you in a far smoother manner than a conventional manual. No double declutching was needed, no perfect timing, no rev matching – even when the synchromesh made manuals easier to live with, the Wilson gearbox made life easier still.

Daimler, in fact, inspired the world’s first fully automatic gearbox. So impressed was General Motors with the pre-selector concept that it bought a 1930 Daimler 20/30hp in order to study its Wilson gearbox – and with hydraulic actuation, a similar concept that became the first of the long line of Hydramatic transmissions; the first fully automatic gearbox design.