Yes, yes. ↑↑↑ How did I forget that. :smack:
Girls that could/would do that were a treasure… 
A push button automatic-but-you-decide-when is essentially what we have now, because all automatics have the option of being downshifted if you need to slow down on a long hill and don’t want to heat up the brakes, or are underpowered going up a hill, and want to keep the car in low gear so it won’t stall.
I think there is now a “hill” setting on automatics, so you don’t exactly downshift them, you just tell the car you are on a hill, and if it senses a load, or “freefall,” then it uses the transmission to slow you down, or keep you from stalling, without being “stuck” in low gear. Those cars still have a single low gear. It’s probably second, although I don’t know. They are four-speed automatics with only one choice for “low.” Maybe they still shift between second and third when they are in low.
We now have semi-manual automatics and semi-automatic manuals. So the line between “manual” and automatic" is getting more and more blurred. Used to be each type had a completely different set of controls and a completely different set of innards.
The paddle shifter controls on many current sporty cars unlock a mechanical flat plate clutch and drive the transmission into a new gear then relock the clutch, perhaps adjusting engine RPM to match.
Whether the transmission innards are two parallel shafts & synchromesh gears driven by solenoid operated forks like an old-fashioned manual or are 2 or 3 serial sets of electro-hydraulically controlled planetary gear rigs like an old-fashioned automatic doesn’t much matter to the end user.
Most semi-automatic gearboxes in passenger cars are just automatic gearboxes where you control the shift timing. They don’t have clutches, just torque converters.
Moderate- or high-performance cars are sometimes offered with dedicated multimode manual gearboxes, like the VW DSG arrangement. Those are a lot more complicated.
New BMW is pretty much electronic. Push button and move lever to shift gears, or use the paddles on the steering wheel if you want to try sports semi-manual mode. Just push the “P” button on top of the shifter to put it in park. I think the shifter stick is for familiarity rather than real function. So yes, it’s pretty much all electronic.
the catch in all these is that without mechanical control, you have no control. You are relying on a program and an actuator to do your work. Great until it stops working. (In all the hoo-ha about runaway Toyotas, for example, I marvelled that they did not have a kill switch. Basically, they rely on a program running in a computer to read a switch and say “oh, you pushed that button you want me to stop the motor”. In a mechanical device capable of killing people, it would be nice to have something that works even if the computer freezes or stops listening to inputs. At least GM’s problem was the car stopped, not that it ran away.)
I see the thread has moved on to paddle shifting and semi-automatic manuals and other cool stuff, but before it moves out of reach, I like to thank all who gave their responses and more or less confirmed my view that manual column shifters were indeed kind of a PITA, certainly mechanically inferior to an equivalent floor shifter; no improvement in ergonomics of usage except perhaps when learning to drive, or in certain instances on hot-date night (probably excludes 99% of the time for an average person driving your average sedan); but which did free up space from the middle position on those 3 person bench seats (another feature which was becoming prominent in the advertising of the late 30s - “TRUE” 6 passenger sedans, so I guess they really did need that space clear of a floor shifter - too bad almost all autos were front engine/rear wheel drive and so had fairly prominent drivetrain humps running thru the passenger compartment).
It’s almost like manual column shifts were like some sort of faddish design choice, similar to fender skirts or excess height tail fins or Dagmar bumper guards…
OK, I understand, if column shifts were useful for anything it was for the extra passenger position on that front bench seat. I have driven crew-cab 6 passenger pickup trucks with column shifted automatics where that extra space came in handy (I have also driven floor shifted manual crew-cab pickups, where that middle space was deemed the castration seat).
For the heck of it, I looked at the interiors of some classic autos from the 40s and 50s via Google Image (not being near a car show at this time), checking for the combination of clutch pedal and column shift. One interesting thing I noticed on the Fords (both a 1950 Tudor and the very nice looking 1958 Ford Fairlane - with excess height fins), was the gearshift was on a separate shaft mounted above the steering column proper, while for equivalent Chevys and Plymouths the gearshift and steering shaft etc. was encased in one big cowling.
It’s my impression/memory that in the old Detroit ocean liners, there was more room and the transmission was further forward, not sitting directly where the middle passenger’s feet would go. So the center hump was a lot smaller than a full console between the two front seats found in modern cars (and with the full auto frame, the transmission did not intrude as high into the cabin). There was plenty of room for that third or fourth passenger in the front bench seat and a column shift just avoided crunching their legs.
Don’t forget in the baby boom era, 3 or 4 kids was common - so seat space was at a premium in the typical automobile.
This is true of any automatic gearbox. They could all just as easily be controlled by buttons - and often were. Chrysler’s PowerFlite transmission, which debuted in the 50s, was controlled with buttons.
Which brings up the next, and perhaps most important point. Drive-in movies. As cool as bucket seats and 4 speed transmissions were, nothing beat the bench seat and 3 on the tree for a date at the [del]passion pit[/del] drive-in.
Can’t resist chiming in about my girlfriend shifting while snuggling. Came in handy later teaching her to drive, she knew the gear pattern.
Anybody drive a big truck with a Brownie transmission? Floor stick one was 1-5 and stick two was 1-4. Giving you 20 gears. Work 1-5 like normal, reach through the steering wheel with the left arm while the right hand is on the other stick and walk up through 6-10 etc… Oh yeah, double clutching the whole time.
Fins. FINS?? Go look at 1957 Plymouths… :eek::eek:
Must have been a Chevy, they were notorious for that for 10-12 years. '64 El Camino here, same thing.
Even cars as mundane as 2001 Smart I had have DSG or Tiptronic type transmissions. No torque converter, it’s an electromechanically actuated clutch with fly-by-wire throttle control. One of the tweaks you could do via a remap was to speed up the shifting a bit.
The automatic in my BMW 120d does use a torque converter. It has three modes of operation, normal, sport where it revs a bit higher before shifting, and ‘manual’ where you tell it when to do the shifting.
I think there’s no reason other than tradition why the control needs to be a stick next to the driver.
they do exist, under a number of different names. VW/Audi calls theirs “DSG,” Ford calls theirs Powershift, Fiat-Chrysler’s is a “robotised manual,” etc. Some are single-clutch, others have two clutches with one controlling the odd gears and the other controlling the even gears (dual-clutch transmission or DCT.) The vast majority of people just let them work automatically because practically nobody cares about choosing gears themselves and the car is far smarter than any person when it comes to picking the most economical gear.
Also, Lincoln has gone to “push button” gear selection on the MKZ and MKC, but that’s still controlling a conventional planetary automatic transaxle.
automatic transmissions have multiple clutches, I can assure you.
Yes, we owned a couple with worn linkage. A real pain.
Had a used up, abused & wore out 1952 GMC ½ ton.
Had 3 on the tree. ( I always find saying that fun ) and the linkage could not be locked in any position, was way to loose and only in imaginary formation. Transmission was pretty worn also.
Only bad think was you could get it in 2 gears at once if you were not careful.
Took a couple of days to figure out what you had to do to shift stopped or moving, going up or down in gear.
Looked a bit silly, kind of like a conductor in front of the orchestra…
Give it what it needed and it was fine. 
Not a problem.
Stick iyt in two gears at once, now that was a PITA. :mad:
My first car was a 1960 Humber 80 (look it up), with 4 speed manual with a column shift. The knob had to be pulled away from the column and then push the lever all the way forward, past the 3-4 plane, to get into reverse. 1-2 was pull the lever towards you, 3-4 let the spring pull it into the right plane, odd gears up and even ones down.
An even odder one was a late 50’s Peugeot 403. It had 4 forward speeds like my Humber, but the shift pattern had pull towards you and down for 1, 2-3 in the central plane and 4th away and up. Reverse was similar to the Humber with a lock until you pulled the knob out from the column, then in the same plane as 4th but downwards.
The advantages in both those cars was making more room in the front. With a smaller car, that made more sense than for a land yacht like a 50’s-60’s Ford or Plymouth.
In defence of column gearshifts, I often drove my father’s Citroën DS19 that had one and it was a dream. Five forward gears and it just slipped them in like it was an automatic. I never missed or wrongly selected a gear and the mechanism never jammed to my knowledge. The car was already over ten years old when I was driving it.
Auto boxes, especially those on heavy trucks have come a long way in the last few years. In Europe almost all new trucks are fully automatic with a manual override. Many large fleet operators disable the manual to stop drivers from abusing it. The very latest ones are integrated with GPS and Cruise Control, so that they can anticipate hills and speed limits, choosing the appropriate speed and gear. They also have radar to detect impending collisions and apply the brakes if necessary. I imagine that it will not be too long before they steer themselves as well.
I see that America is following Europe’s lead in this but drivers are reluctant to lose the macho image.
Compare this with this . Skip the first couple of minutes of the Scania video.
OK, after two months, I have a follow-up to this thread about column manual gearshifts back in the day.
Starting from the Tubacain shop video channel of Mr. Pete (he’s beginning a new series on cutting and milling gears), looking over the YouTube video recommendations I noted several vintage Chevy technical/sales videos (1930s Style Infomercials), and as you may guess one video espoused the glories of the new Column mounted gearshifts then coming into vogue, and how adding the INCREDIBLE POWER OF VACUUM makes them even better - Vacuum Control Gear Shift.
(I started the video when the narrator stops talking about the general awesomeness of vacuum in everyday 1938 life, and begins to concentrate on column gearshifts.)
Note the woman’s skirt getting caught on the floor gearshift, done in such an offhand manner I thought it was merely a blooper, but no - at the end of the video many of the points that were made in favor of column gearshifts by previous posters to this thread are reiterated. It also nicely demonstrates what a bodge-job those column shifter mechanisms really were back then, vacuum or not.
It’s really vacuum-assist, not vacuum-control, and a lost of parts of cars have that, FWIW-- the brakes for example. And my 61 Ford had an entirely vacuum driven motor for the windshield wipers.
It’s interesting that because safety and lack of effort are being stressed, they use women driving alone. Usually car commercials barely acknowledge that know how to drive.