Abandoned History: Ford's Cruise-O-Matic and the C Family of Automatic Transmissions (Part III)
We pick up our Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission coverage again today, as Ford's first mass-produced gearbox found its stride in the Fifties. As we discussed in our last entry, in 1957 and 1958 Ford offered fiddly Keyboard Control. The whiz-bang new feature meant the Cruise-O-Matic was operated by confusingly marked dash-mounted buttons on select Mercury vehicles. And while Keyboard Control was limited to Mercury, an even worse version of the same idea was reserved for Edsel.
Source: thetruthaboutcars.com