John DeLorean was recruited by Packard Engineering in 1953, DeLorean and his team delivered a new “Twin-Ultramatic” transmission for the 1955 Packards and one year later they created the “Touch Button Ultramatic“ version.

Buried in a wooden shipping crate at America’s Packard Museum is a transmission with a story nobody tells.

the Packard transmission team recognized an opportunity to improve the transmission. 

After multiple years of testing and refinement Packard announced the availability of their automatic transmission which they christened the “Ultramatic Drive”. 

It’s worth noting that the transmission was designed and manufactured using entirely in-house engineering resources – something that no other American independent automaker would accomplish. 

As delivered, the transmission combined a fluid coupled torque converter for smoothness with a two speed axial drive. This provide the owner with two power ranges; a high range for normal driving plus a low range suitable for driving at low speeds through mud and snow. Additionally the engineering team created a lock up feature in the torque converter that improved fuel economy at highway speeds. The next time you drive your automobile remember to thank Packard engineering for this innovation – it continues to be used in automatic transmissions to this day. 

On May 31, 1949 the first production Packard with Ultramatic made the drive from Detroit, Michigan to Indianapolis, Indiana

Over the next several years the Packard Engineering team set about improving the transmission.

When John DeLorean joined the team he was presented with a problem. Packard customers thought their cars accelerated slowly when the transmission was used with the normal high range. Slow enough that some Packard owners were using the low range to accelerate away from a traffic light and then manually “shifting” the transmission to the high range. Yes, manually shifting from the low range to the high range produced better acceleration but it would also damage the transmission after a while

This resulted in a second version of the transmission called the “Gear-Start Ultramatic Drive” which was made available with 1954 Packards. While it still had two ranges – low and high – it included a third option that would start in the transmission in the low range and then automatically shift to the high range as the car gained speed. 

This significantly improved vehicle acceleration from a standing start and made Packard customers much happier.

This fantastic update included push button control of the transmission. It was quite the swan song for Packard and a big win for DeLorean’s team.

this resulted in DeLorean being promoted to replace McFarland as the Head of Research and Development at Packard

https://packardprovinggrounds.org/john-delorean-and-the-fantastic-ultramatic-drive

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