Enter the Eaton Yale company of the United States. Eaton Yale manufactured industrial equipment-specifically conveyor systems. They had developed an electric clutch using iron powder. A magnet around the powder caused the powder to align on the magnetic lines of force (remember those experiments and demonstrations in Junior High School?). This clutch had been very successful in factories and Eaton Yale developed it further into an automatic transmission. However, in the mid-nineteen fifties they could find no takers in the US auto industry. This was due to several factors-the first being the “Not Invented Here” philosophy of the Big Three aut makers-they would not accept any idea that did not come from inside the American auto industry, second was the fact that the Big Three all had already developed automatic transmissions and saw no reason to spend money on a new and untried idea that they felt they really did not need. Finally, the entire American auto industry was aware of the disaster that had occurred at Packard in 1955 when an electrically operated automatic transmission was a major failure and virtually destroyed the company over night. The American auto industry was so fearful of any type of electrical equipment that Chrysler actually developed a manually operated push button control system for their automatic transmissions!
So, Eaton Yale offered their unique automatic transmission to manufacturers in Europe. Smiths electrical equipment of England bought all of the rights and patents and developed the idea further. The thing that made the electric transmission so desirable in Europe was that it did not require a powerful engine and produced fuel economy almost equal to a manual transmission. Rootes, always with an eye to what customers wanted, saw in the Smith’s transmission a unique opportunity to introduce an automatic transmission into England and Europe and to have a “compact” fighter to sell in the United States.
The Easidrive had all the elements of success in it except two things- the American fear of anything new and different and the fact that Americans bought a lot of the little foreign cars on their “sports car” appeal. Cars such as the Saab and Volvo for example sold as four passenger sports cars-along with Rootes own Sunbeam Rapier.
The failure of the Easidrive to make the impact on sales in the United States spelled the beginning of the end of Rootes in the United States. I have a letter from Ian Garrard (the man behind the Sunbeam Tiger) that when he took over the West Coast operations of Rootes in 1960, he had hundreds of unsold Hillman Easidrive cars sitting in storage unsold. He first job was to get rid of all those Hillmans and Singers.
The situation, however, got worse. The Easidrive depended on many mechanical relays to handle the switching. When those relays got old, they corroded and failed to function. There were not many mechanics in the United States trained on or familiar with the Easidrive so repairs were a problem. As with most Rootes products, there was a Series II Easidrive that substituted transistors for the mechanical relays and was more reliable. However, by the time the Series II Easidrive rolled out in 1962 the damage had been done and Easidrive equipped cars were very hard to sell as new cars and as used cars. In 1965 I bought a 1960 Special with Easidrive for $125. I drove it for about a year before I replaced the Easidrive with a manual clutch and transmission.
When the Special had an Easidrive installed it got an ammeter on the dash and got a black starter button replacing the pull switch on the dashboard. Part of the Easidrive installation included a larger, more powerful generator and a different regulator. Even with this, driving at night with the headlights on, wipers on, radio on and heater blower on would kill the battery! I know, I got stuck one night and had to crank the car started by hand and then drove with just the lights and wipers on.
