The 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, featuring front-wheel drive. Photo courtesy James Joel.
There were parallel experimental front-wheel-drive programs operating at Ford and Oldsmobile in the late 1950s–though the two outfits arrived at a similar conclusion from very different directions. GM launched development of the “Senior Compact” line in the midst of the Eisenhower recession, and divisional engineering boss Andrew Watt and assistant chief engineer John Beltz pitched that Olds’ version feature front-wheel-drive–a feature that would aid the smaller car’s interior room. Engineer Fred Hooven, who had a rich engineering career before joining Ford in 1957 and who held patents in fields as diverse as avionics, photographic typesetting and automotive suspension systems, believed that the advantages of front-wheel-drive spoke for themselves. Hooven applied, and was issued a patent, for a front-drive package with a longitudinal engine and a transmission along side, with one of the driveshafts passing through the engine sump. Ford spent $3 million creating front-drive 1961 Thunderbird prototypes before canceling the program in 1960.
The rear-drive, production 1961 Thunderbird. Photo courtesy Alden Jewell.
Other false front-drive starts for both Ford and Olds were on the horizon, and you can probably lay that at the feet of the hyper-successful but utterly-conventional Ford Falcon, a car that outsold every other compact in the wave of compacts for the early ‘60s. Perhaps as a result, the Olds F-85 prototypes running around by the spring of 1960 were all rear-wheel-drive. Ford, meanwhile, was working on Project Cardinal, an all-new, sub-Falcon-sized, V4-powered front-driver to compete more directly with Volkswagen–but Lee Iacocca, surmising that it could hurt booming Falcon sales, convinced Henry Ford II to abandon it at the eleventh hour. Henry instead sent Cardinal to Ford Germany, where it launched as the new Taunus 12M; though built overseas, all of the development and styling work were done in the US. Some could see the Taunus as the first postwar American front-driver, despite the country that assembled it.
German market 1963 Ford Taunus, the first Ford to feature front-wheel drive. Photo courtesy Alden Jewell.
And so finally we get to the Toronado, a car that made a positive out of two unhappy situations at Oldsmobile (the division’s extensive front-drive experiments had gone unproduced, and at the same time, Olds lost out on the bidding for the car that became the Buick Riviera). When Ed Cole decided that Olds should have its own personal-luxury car too, the wheels were set in motion. Destined to share chassis architecture with the forthcoming ’67 Cadillac Eldorado, the engine was longitudinal in case Cadillac’s in-development V12 came through. (It did not.) The engine was offset nearly two inches, and the transaxle was an engineering marvel: dubbed TH425, and based on the new three-speed Turbo-Hydramatic introduced for 1965, it was turned 180 degrees and mounted to the left side of the engine block. The variable-pitch torque converter was attached to a short pre-stretched, two-inch-wide chain (chosen over belt- and gear-driven systems for both durability and silence), which activated the transmission. The equal-length half-shafts, with telescoping inner CV joints, had been patented by John DeLorean for use in the rope-drive Tempest in order to resist accelerative squat. In the Toronado, they helped eliminate torque steer. The passenger’s-side halfshaft used a rubber damper to absorb vibrations. The whole unit took little more space in the engine bay than a conventional engine by itself.
The 1961 Oldsmobile F85; like the Ford Falcon, it remained rear-wheel drive. Photo courtesy John W .
And the rest was history: the Toronado launched in 1966, the V8-powered Cadillac Eldorado launched a year later. By the end of the first generation’s life at the end of 1970, nearly 90,000 Eldorados and 125,000 Toronados were built–not exactly sales-breaking stuff. They were jointly redesigned for 1971, and together the pair remained GM’s, and America’s, only domestically-built front-wheel drive cars until the late 1970s (save for the GMC motorhome, which shared the second-generation Toronado’s driveline and which isn’t really a car anyway). The GM personal-luxury siblings were outliers, and are all the more interesting for it. bit it’s ironic that front-wheel-drive, understood today to be a paragon of packaging efficiency, was by 1978 installed in some of the biggest, heaviest, thirstiest cars on sale in America.
More gadget review in www.mamaktalk.com
