1954 Bel Air

The other day, I posted my thread on automobiles.  After I'd written it, I took this photo of a very nicely restored 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air.

I had a 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe myself, a picture of which is provided below.

 

 I used mine as a daily driver, while I had it.  It was a really neat car, and I should have kept it, although using it that way turned you into a full time mechanic.

Anyhow, the Bel Aire, which should have rear wheel well covers, but in the very nice example above does not, provides an example of something I didn't talk about in my recent entry. That 54 Bel Air is an automatic transmission.

Automatic transmissions go further back than that, but they weren't the transmission of choice for legitimate reasons. But about that time, they started to improve to the extent that they soon would be.  Sluggish at first, by the 1960s they'd improved a great deal.  By the early 1970s they were coming out in pickup trucks, and within the last decade they started to supplant standard transmissions in trucks, even 1 ton 4x4 trucks.  You can still get standards, but its getting difficult to do so. Standards are gone in mid sized cards entirely, and when you find them in a car today, it's probably in a small sporty car.

Quite a change.

My 54 had a three speed transmission with column shift.