most interesting Marc! thanks for that. Wasn't there also Ford trucks in Germany during the war? And something that always fascinated me is that Junkers Diesel opposed piston aircraft engine, edit Bofors and Oerlikon made out well selling guns to both sides
The Roto-Hydramatic 375 was not a replacement for the 4-spd Super Hydramatic 315, but a companion unit for the 'junior full-size lines' At Pontiac (and these trans' names are from Pontiac), this was the Catalina & Grand Prix (come '62). Both the RHM and SHM were in use thru '64. Daimler never bought a U.S. transmission plant from GM. And if you meant 'plans', I certainly would be interested to read details of this arrangement.
There is another website that has thoes I can't remember the name but it was something co automotive.
Mercedes also trademarked a 4-pointed star, to give their 3-pointed star design a 'buffer'. What the 4th point were to then stand for, is unknown. Mercedes sent a 'cease & desist' letter to FoMoCo once they saw the Continental Division's 1956 4-pointed star emblem, which Ford promptly ignored and Mercedes promptly dropped the issue.
The two verified instances I am aware of GM outright selling their engineering was both from Buick; the 215 CI aluminum V8 (Rover), and the V6 in the early 70s (which Buick went ahead and bought back- hence the few year gap with no V6s). I do know GM allowed 'open sharing' of it's design of the collapsible steering column to other auto companies, but that's a little different. Would certainly like to read details of these "a lot" of instances of selling their tech to the competition.
Hmmm. The German government seized the Opel properties soon after the war began, and controlled those properties and the production there (using a lot of slave/prisoner labor). As such, there certainly would have been no necessity to pay royalties out of state. Seems a bit out of character for regime hell bent on world domination, mass territorial invasion and ethnic cleansing would bother to sit down and hammer out a royalties agreement, then make timely and lucrative payments, doesn't it? All during the war and as late as July 1945, GM's U.S. administration had little to no information on even the physical state of the Opel properties. At one point immediately after the end of the war, the Russians were demanding the Opel properties be turned over to them in the name of reparations, but the US Government prevailed (with no input from GM). The US Treasury Department initially allowed a write down on GM's recent high-dollar investment in Germany, yet still considered GM the owners, post-war. In 1946, GM head Alfred Sloan came out against regaining the Opel business due to the devastated European market post WWII. Negotiations with the Allied Military Government dragged on for 2 more years, and it wasn't until November 1948 that GM Corporate authorized resumption of management control of Opel. The recorded GM production from Opel from 1940 thru 1948 is 0.
Learned this at paint school awhile back, Lexus, Luxury Export to the US Don't know if its accurate or not
fun and hard times! I remember taking a whole day (which was precious). when having to run the stock air box in stock class, testing with dry ice in that air box for a denser charge with different jetting, timing, clutching, etc. only to come to the conclusion it was just to inconsistent. Later that night we made water bottle bombs with the dry ice and threw them in the river and blowing up some fish by our race shop. Lol What a wasted day of testing. I can remember running my first .99 sixty ft’ time on ice with our 1,000 cc Imp stocker. if you remember, we sold clutch kits. Well later That led into setting up complete race sleds for other teams that competed out East... and not usually against us. We set up a sled for brake torquing, and had to teach the driver how to brake torque on our test track. In doing so, his first “hit” the sled flew out from under him and he ended up on his ass on the ice! Yes, good times
I thought her name was Porsche! My mothers maiden name was Carrera, I tried to get one of my cousins when they had a daughter to name them Porsche but they wouldn't do it. True story.
Ok: The quote about the transmissions I got from a guy who worked there at DB in the early 60s. It probably was the plans or design for the thing, the arrangement that DB had with Stewart-Warner for their automatics wasn't making sense anymore. as for the Roto-Hydramatic, maybe it wasn't designed as an outright replacement, but in actuality it replaced the 4 speed hydramatic in every application the 4 speed was used in 1961, which was about the same year DB released their new 4 speed automatic. I'll have to read some more to confirm or dispute, let you know what I find out. As for the Nazis seizing Opel, ah, no they didn't. The Nazis never nationalized any companies, check out Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction", - they didn't have to. The Opel Vorstand went along willingly, (this was the process of Gleichschaltung) and the according to the Geneva rules, shell companies were set up like they were in WWI and foreign owned entities were held in trust, with royalties tabulated and collected after the fact if they weren't paid in. In fact, the only country ever to break this arrangement and actually benefit from foreign patents was surprisingly enough, the Americans when they took Bayer's Aspirin and called it Anacin or when they took Penaten-creme and called it Noxema. (after WWI) . The royalties issue was Opel's problem to resolve, not the Nazis. Yes, due to hostilities Opel didn't "report" directly to GM, but the ownership and assets were placed in trust in Switzerland and Sweden. They had to resolve it in order to keep supply lines in neutral countries running, i.e., raw materials, so they had to go with the rules. Yes, they called for quotas, and after Speer took over in 1942, he forced a number of edicts forward and redistributed production, but he allowed the Vorstand a free hand and left them alone if they complied, which Opel did. But they were never nationalized or seized. That's a convenient fiction that was circulated after the war to keep the heat off. Yes, the Russians wanted what fell into their zone, and eventually got it. Opel wasn't paid a dime for what the Russians took and nor was BMW; if fact, they got around it by seizing the plants and calling it "war reparations" and then claiming that since the plant was all gone that these were new outfits totally outside of any prewar arrangements. (BMW sued EMW in 1952 and won) Take a look at IBM; they made a killing with their census machines and that German subsidiary wasn't wound down until the 60s, and yet they were the people who provided all the machines that were able to keep an accurate count of all the various minorities and such that the Nazis eventually liquidated. A similar arrangement went on with Coca-Cola, who couldn't get anymore Coke from anywhere so turned their production to a homegrown product called "Fanta". Here again, Coke eventually got paid, so did GM and IBM. The forensics of the actual transactions weren't completed until the mid nineties when a whistle-blower working with the Swiss banks finally let out what the Swiss and their various American clients wanted kept quiet; that both sides were greased with Nazi money throughout the war.
Incorrect. Like I posted earlier; @ Pontiac the 4-spd Super HydraMatic continued in Bonnevilles & Star Chiefs until '65 and the Turbo HydraMatic. Cadillac also ran the 4-spd HM thru '63, it got the THM for '64. Buick ran their DynaFlow-based Twin-Turbine thru '63, then got a switch-pitch version of the THM in '64. Pontiac & Olds had to wait until '65 for the THM, so they were still running the RHM & SHM (Olds named them differently). Perhaps the confusion is that the junior full-size models went from the 4-spd SHM in '60 to the 3-spd RHM in '61. That is correct. But the 4-spd was still exclusively in numerous models. What's more likely than anything is Daimler did some reverse-engineering of the GM automatic (not saying this is fact, but I wouldn't be surprised; this was a period of regular benchmarking by mercedes). Wiki states the '61 benz K4A automatic had a maximum torque input of only 181 lb-ft; that's well shy of what the RHM handled. I have a RHM 375 in a Grand Prix rated at 430 TRQ, and that's not even the top engine option (same engine options were available behind the SHM 4-spd). Either Daimler did an incredibly slip-shod job of building a 'GM automatic' or they massively dumbed it down.
Alright; I'll look up the GM Hydramatics...I've redone a number of Oldsmobiles and have never seen a 4 speed in one after 1961, only the 3 speed Slim-Jims, and my Pontiac buddies hated the "Slim-Jim" too and claimed that was all one could get after 61. Most modified a 200R4 into their cars, supposedly almost a bolt in replacement. So that warrants further study. I could never understand why they would have dropped the 4 speed, it was a good transmission, I had one in a 60 Olds and it was far superior to that wretched Slim Jim that I had in a 62 and a 64 Olds. The last Olds I worked over was a buddy's 1963 98 convertible that had, - you guessed it, a "Slim-Jim" 3 speed with a lagging first gear and no downshift left. Honestly can't say anything good about them, and I gave them the "old college try" and each and every one crapped out the same way. The Olds literature from the period claims that the "new" Roto-hydramatic" was "lighter, faster and more responsive and better on fuel" than the previous unit was. Yeah, sure; it was GM's biggest blunder, and was maybe marginally better than the grade retard Super Turbine was in the 58-59 Buicks that were unfortunate enough to have them. I'll delve into the DB automatics, and what you're saying there sounds more like what would have happened. Those early DB automatics weren't the greatest, in fact, a DB mechanic I used to work with said they were pretty much crap all through the 70s. He did confirm that a lot of the internals for that thing could be had at GM, - that could have been a coincidence or they both used the same manufacturer for some things, who knows.
Digging into the issue a bit further, I made a couple of mistakes; first, it was a Borg-Warner automatic in the mid-fifties Mercedes, and the Buick transmission that was a dog was the "Fligh-pitch turbine", not the Super Turbine. And it seems that the 4 speed Hydramatic was used in the senior Pontiacs and Cadillac, but not in Olds after 1961. I can't find any direct link from DB to GM except that the early design that they used in the 1961 220 SEb was very similar to a Hydramatic in layout and design; so they probably copied it. So I sit corrected...my apologies.
For the Pontiacs, just think of the wheelbase to determine the auto tranny: Catalina and Grand Prix for 3-speed, Star Chief and Bonneville for 4-speed.
Easy enough to get muddled; Advertising frequently used a bunch of different terms to describe the same thing, and the same terms to describe different things. I just read a handful of various GM enthusiast tech pages on transmissions in this period, and I think I came away with more questions. And I see some statements that are either openly unsure, or erroneous. Olds had a 'Jetaway Drive' auto in '64, available on the F-85 & Jetstar 88. Of course; those 2 were an intermediate and a full-size. They also had the 'HydraMatic with Accel-A-Rotor', standard on the Starfire & 98, optional on the Jetstar I, Dynamic 88 and Super 88. That's 2 different trans; the Jetaway Drive was a 2-spd. I see one claim that the Accel-A-Rotor was the 3-spd Roto HydraMatic... but I think one would have to sit down with sales brochures and shop manuals, year-by-year, to sort all this out into a giant chart.
The BMW logo is supposed to look like a spinning propeller. I believe the smallest big block Chevy that isn't a W series motor is the 366 (not the 396) found in medium duty trucks in the mid 60s. For something a little more modern: the Ft Wayne, Indiana GM truck plant has a paint booth that isn't large enough to fit a crew cab long bed truck inside it. When such a truck is to be painted, GM has implemented a "box swap" method where the long bed off the crew cab truck will be temporarily swapped with the short bed of a regular cab truck that is being painted the same color. This makes the crew cab truck short enough to fit in the paint booth. After being painted, the beds are swapped back again.
