Talk:Hill-holder

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[edit] When was it introduced?

Does anybody know when Hill-holder was first made available by Studebaker? Studebaker President, and several other pages on the web, say that it went back at least as far 1937. Was it available earlier than this? --Interiot 01:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Mid-1930s. Studebaker released it in lieu of coming out with a semi-automatic. They also came out with free-wheeling, but I have yet to find a simple explaination of how it worked. I had a car with Hill-holder, and it was pretty useless after you fingered out how to drive the manual. Except it made a HUGE difference on my Aunt's 1940 Champion which didn't have power anything; your hands were too busy trying to get the wheel turned to operate a parking break if you were trying to park the thing on the street. Stude62 01:44, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, a couple of references on the 'net mention an introduction in 1936 on the President, so we'll go with that for now, unless better info pops up [1] [2] [3]. On the other hand, there are references to Stutz's "Noback" feature, and Stutz stopped producing cars in 1935, so maybe Stutz introduced one first? --Interiot 07:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How did it go from Studebaker to Subaru ?

How was the license transferred from one company (now defunct) to another ? StuRat 23:21, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

This forum post claims: "The hillholder clutch was on every manual transmission Subaru with a cable clutch since the early 80's ... perhaps even the 70's. It was based on a patent that Subaru had bought from Studebaker. As far as I know, it RELIED on the car having a cable clutch. This is why the later Subies with hydraulic clutches didn't have them." This other forum post concurs. If anyone knows what that patent number is, it would be really good to list that in the article, since all patents are available online and are public domain. --Interiot 20:23, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Patents

I was digging around for a little more information. U.S. Patent 6,021,880  mentions a number of patents from the 1934-1937 period, all seem to be related to one way or another of implementing hill-holder functionality. I'm not sure which companies these are related to, or which are most relevant to the article, so I'm just listing them out here:

--Interiot 20:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)