Favorite Car with semi-automatic

["John G. Napoli" <john@xxxxxxxxx>]

It also confuses the heck out of your passengers, who can't figure out what
you're doing. Sometimes you are using the clutch, sometimes you're not.
Sometimes you're shifting to accelerate, sometimes you're not. I can only
imagine what it would be like to explain it to a teenaged valet.

[Unless you're starting in low range, you wouldn't be using the clutch]

You need the clutch to shift between ranges, or to accelerate the automatic shift from a lower gear to the higher gear (just depress and release).

>
> There is no lockup fluid coupling on either Fluid Drive or
> Fluid-Torque Drive as there is on a modern torque converter.
> The only '50's lockup converter I've heard of is the Packard
> Ultramatic.
>

Now, fluid couplings do not offer any torque multiplication, either. That's
why the early GM Hydramatic automatic transmissions had 4 forward gears -
there was no torque multiplication available to assist in getting the car
off the line - Hydramatics used fluid couplings.

[GM Hydramatics after 1961 did use torque converters.]

Yeah, but these were not four-speed Hydramatics - they were an entirely different transmission with three speeds.  GM kept the equity they had in the name.  All of the original Hydramatics (up until something like 1964 IIRC) had four speeds (no overdrives!) and fluid couplings, and were a distinctive family of transmissions - remember the old B&M Hydro?