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Easy Driver: 1937

1937. "Woman demonstrating remote-control 'Safety Shift' gear lever in 1938 Pontiac sedan." Adding another page to our excruciatingly detailed visual record of early Pontiac marketing in the Bay Area. 8x10 acetate negative. View full size.

1937. "Woman demonstrating remote-control 'Safety Shift' gear lever in 1938 Pontiac sedan." Adding another page to our excruciatingly detailed visual record of early Pontiac marketing in the Bay Area. 8x10 acetate negative. View full size.

 

On Shorpy:
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I Love the Banjo Wheel

the photo makes it appear to ba a nifty butterscotch color!

Looks like a floor dimmer to me...

While I'm sure some of the older cars may have had a floor switch to start the car, that sure looks like the dimmer switch I had in my '61 and '51 Cadillacs.

Definitely the dimmer switch in the image

The first car I remember that my parents owned was a 1940 Chevrolet. It had two floor mounted switches. The dimmer switch as shown in the post but it also had a floor mounted starter switch that, if my memory is correct was located to the right side of the gas pedal.

With the floor mounted starter switch location near the center of the car it was a relatively short cable run to the starter for the high current load and it probably also was used to mechanically engaged the starter motor to the flywheel. (I am guessing about that last part since I was a little too young to understand the concept of how it operated)

Starter switch

The switch on the floor is almost certainly not the dimmer, but the starter switch. You turned on the ignition with the key, then stepped on the starter switch to switch the starter motor on and turn the engine over.

[It's the headlight switch. Below, an illustration from the 1938 Pontiac owners manual (Spanish edition). "Foot switch for lamps." - Dave]

Floor switch

I'll bet that at least some of the Shorpy readers don't remember that, long before the column-mounted device, the headlight dimmer was controlled by a high/low push button on the floor, just to the left of the clutch pedal!

Separate Ignition/door key

It's been quite a few years since the last time I had a GM car with the Square top ignition key and the round top door key (was probably my '82 Buick Regal).

"Column Shift" was not unique to Pontiac that year.

It was also used on the 1938 Cadillac 60 Special I owned back in the day (1948). Never had a shifting problem with it. Gone but sure not forgotten.

Brett is not the only one.

When I took drivers' training in the summer of '64, the local high school had a fleet of Valiant automatics, and one '61 full-sized Plymouth beater with three-on-the-tree. Since I was the only student in class with a manual transmission vehicle at home (Ma's '62 Falcon - she refused to drive an automatic), I got the bulk of the seat time in this lumbering lump. There was a two-foot length of broom handle on the floor of the instructor's side, which Mr. Wing would use to "massage" the transmission hump, thus encouraging it to shift when the linkage hung up on me.

Back to the Future

Above the ignition key and below the Pontiac logo on the dashboard there appears to be a clock face that could pass for a GPS screen.

At Long Last, Room!

With the centrally mounted floor shifter's elimination came a new generation of middle-front-seat passengers: those whose knees remained unbruised by rapid gear changes.

Safety step #1

Get some different shoes.

Three on the tree

The "safety shift" is what those of us old enough to remember called "three on the tree". I would debate the "safety" aspect of this shifter. The last one I drove (in a ~1975 Chevy truck we had at the Parks and Rec. department) worked fine most of the time. But they were fairly notorious for the mechanism in the shift lever end getting hopelessly stuck in an intermediate state where it couldn't be moved without getting out and yanking on the levers at the transmission end. Coasting to a stop in the middle of the road while furiously and usually futilely trying to get it back into gear is not what I consider safe!

Safety -- 1937

An ignition lock strong enough to hold keys.
No air bag on the steering wheel to explode with shrapnel.
No floor mat to jam the accelerator pedal.

[In 1937, there were fourteen motor-vehicle fatalities for every 100 million miles traveled by car in the United States. In 2013, one person died for every 100 million miles traveled. So in the 1937 car, on 1937 roads, you are 14 times as likely to die. -Dave]

Pontiac Offers "Safety Shift"

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