Читать книгу Robot, Take the Wheel - Jason Torchinsky - Страница 18

While not strictly a self-driving innovation, the development of the automatic transmission should be considered a step on the way to autonomy for automobiles. It was even referred to as “self-drive” in many early contemporary descriptions, because to people used to the near-constant shifting of gears, it felt like the car itself was doing a lot more work.

And the truth is it was. Determining the proper gear ratio for the needs of the car wasn’t trivial, and the automatic transmission freed the driver to focus on the more fundamental tasks of driving, speed modulation, and directional control.

First developed by General Motors (GM) (specifically its Cadillac and Oldsmobile divisions), the first commercially available automatic transmission was GM’s Hydra-Matic. Developed in 1939, the Hydra-Matic was the result of a number of earlier research efforts to make a self-shifting transmission, and used a combination of a planetary gearbox—a transmission type that uses a central sun gear and orbiting planet gears (you see why it’s called that, right?)—and a novel fluid coupling to achieve its goal. While heavy and complex, it was a success, and, for the American market in particular, regarding automatic transmissions, the industry never looked back.