What Was the Final US-Market Car with a Two-Speed Transmission?
Two-speeds once roamed every American road. Here's the last new one you could buy.
Murilee Martin
The first genuinely successful automatic transmission was the original GM Hydra-Matic, which made its debut in the 1940 Oldsmobile and boasted four forward gears. For much of the second half of the 20th century, though, the three-speed automatic dominated the American two-pedal automotive world, only disappearing from new cars after—no, this isn't a typo—2002; the four-speed slushbox survived all the way until last year. However, it was the affordable
two-speed automatic that really began the process of putting the clutch on the endangered-species list, and its heyday here was the early 1950s through the middle 1960s. Today we will discuss the very last two-speed available in the United States.