Oldsmobile Rocket 88

Oldsmobile is the senior American automotive make. Its imminent death after becoming so ingrained in the fabric of American life is more than a tragedy; it is a sacrilege. Maybe, there’s no automotive brand as quintessentially “American” as Oldsmobile. Oldsmobile has been innovative, popular, smart,  and fearless through the years since that day in 1895 when Ransom E. Olds and his partner Frank Clark got together to build a “horseless carriage.”

The American industry’s difference

In 1897, Olds and some Lansing, Michigan, businessmen formed  Olds Motor Vehicle Company and thus began the mass production of automobiles in the United States. The Olds Curved Dash Runabout, of course,  was the firm’s calling-card success. In an era when those who were building cars built costly machines for the affluent  few, Olds had the vision of building inexpensive cars for the many. It was that vision that differentiated the American car industry from the fledgling car industries of every other industrialized country in the world.

After Ransom Olds  departed from  the company that bore his name in a rift with his directors, Olds Motor Works drifted for a time. It drifted, in fact,  right into Billy Durant’s General Motors fold where it, along with Buick Motor Company, became the main  building blocks in the success of what would become the biggest industrial corporation in the world.

As part of the GM’s  strategy, Olds settled into a solidly middle-class existence, building good cars for good people. But the marque was more than just another mundane car producer. As the years passed,  Oldsmobile started  to gain a reputation as General Motors’ “experimental” division. Perhaps it began with the Olds side-valve V-8 engines of the Teens and early Twenties. Production V-8 engines were an oddity then, with Oldsmobile’s GM stablemate Cadillac the pioneer of the engine configuration. A V-8 in a medium-priced car was a phenomenon.

Dawn of chrome

In 1925,  Oldsmobile pioneered what has become typical issue for every car on the road–chromium-plated trim. Prior to the Olds introduction of chrome, bright pieces on many cars were nickel-plated and absolutely hellacious to preserve.

Olds picked a shocking  time to drop its V-8 engine for less expensive six-cylinder power. Its Viking V-8 of 1929 and 1930 was a good design for its period, as its 81 horsepower would attest, but coming in tandem with the stock market crash, it wasn’t destined to stick around long. But by the mid-Thirties Oldsmobile had developed a reputation for solid vehicles that also provided technical innovation. This was exemplified in 1937, when Olds was the first to present  the so-called Automatic Safety Transmission. It was one of the first workable systems to do away with the tiresome chore of manual gear changing and followed in the footsteps of Olds’ shift to “synchromesh” in 1931. AST required the driver to make use of  the clutch pedal simply to shift between low and high ranges.

Oldsmobile quickly followed up with the introduction of what is commonly regarded as the first commercially successful automatic transmission. Olds Hydra-Matic system was launched  in 1939 for the 1940 model year, and it was one of the biggest improvements to ease motoring since the invention of the electric self-starter in 1912. Surprisingly, both inventions were chiefly the work of one guy, engineering genius Charles F. Kettering.

Kettering the prolific designer

Though less heralded than Thomas Alva Edison, Charles Franklin Kettering competes  the father of modern electricity for coming up with inventions that changed the manner  people lived their lives. In addition to the electric self-starter, Kettering also enhanced the storage battery-powered electrical ignition that is still used in every gasoline-power vehicle today.

After that early victory, he developed the first practical engine-driven electric generator, which brought electric light into many rural homes for the first time. In 1916,  he sold out his firm  to GM and accepted the post as head of its research laboratory, a position he held for 31 years.

As his career at General Motors approached retirement, Kettering saved one of his best inventions for last, and that invention would be intimately involved with the respected name Oldsmobile. As a nuts-and-bolts thinker, Kettering reasoned that if an engine were able to use a compression ratio higher than normal,  more power would be the natural outcome.  But, as Kettering and his colleagues found out, higher compression engines would literally rattle themselves to death on the low-octane gasoline then available. Engine knock caused by the fuel  exploding rather than burning in the combustion chamber was the main cause. Another inventor might then have thrown up his hands and said, “That’s impossible!”

In typical fashion, Kettering worked backward to look for a solution. Instead of  attempting to adapt his high-compression engine to the available fuel, he set about not only perfecting the high-compression engine, but also perfecting a higher-octane fuel that would make it  sensible. The results of his  works were two-fold: the high compression V-8 engine that would soon come to be known as the Olds “Rocket” engine and high-octane leaded gasoline.

Rocket becomes ordinary for engines

Launched for the 1949 model year, soon after Kettering’s retirement from GM, the Olds “Rocket” V-8 was a revelation.  Of course, the big news was its heady 7.25:1 compression ratio, but the engine featured other state-of-the-art features from its well-balanced 90-degree design to its “monobloc” single cast iron block to its overhead valves to its lightweight pistons. In essence, the Rocket V-8 set the  benchmark  for every American V-8 engine that would follow it for at least three decades. The fact is, the very modern engine that graces today’s Chevrolet Corvette owes an enormous debt to the Rocket and Charles Kettering.

With a displacement of 303 cubic inches and topped by a 2-barrel carburetor, the initial  Rocket V-8 churned out 135 horsepower at 3600 rpm and 263 pound-feet of torque at a lazy 1800 rpm. While this might not seem too potent by today’s standards, in 1949 Ford flat-head V-8s were considered to be among the hottest things on the market, and they delivered  just 130 horsepower. No mid-range vehicle  in the world, save the Hudson Hornet, came close to the Rocket Olds performance potential.

In the immediate post-war years, Oldsmobile had two versions, the near-luxury 98 and the mid-range 76. At first the Rocket (or “Kettering” V-8) seemed destined for just the top-of-the-line 98, but then good sense prevailed and the modern V-8 was also provided in the much-lighter 76 chassis in a new 1949 model dubbed the 88. A  celebrity was born. Though fitted with an automatic transmission (the Olds manual couldn’t handle the engine’s torque), the Oldsmobile 88 was the hit of NASCAR’s 1950 season, winning 8 of the 10 races. Given its lightning-like victory, one could clearly make the case that the Olds 88,  with its 135-horsepower V-8,  was the first “musclecar,” the first in a line that would include the Dodge Charger, Pontiac GTO,  and Olds 442 among scores of others. In fact, all the successful Oldsmobile vehicles that would follow it for the next 30 years would bear the unique  seal of Charles Kettering’s last great invention, the legendary Rocket V-8.

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