Ford Pinto
Offered with an inline-4 engine and bucket seats the Pinto's mechanical design was conventional, with unibody construction, a longitudinally mounted engine in front driving the rear wheels through either a manual or automatic transmission and live axle rear end. Suspension was by unequal-length control arms with front coil springs; the live rear axle was suspended on leaf springs. The rack and pinion steering had optional power assist, as did the brakes.
Chrysler PowerFlite transmission
Chrysler was the last of Detroit's Big Three automakers to introduce a fully automatic transmission, some 14 years after General Motors had introduced Oldsmobile's Hydramatic automatic transmission and nearly three years after Ford's Ford-O-Matic. Packard's Ultramatic debuted in 1949, and Studebaker's Automatic Drive was introduced in 1950. The PowerFlite was simple in its construction and operation, with fewer parts than competing transmissions. It was also quite durable, being used behind every Chrysler Corporation engine from the lowly Plymouth Six to the Imperial's Hemi V-8. Unlike most other automatic transmissions, PowerFlite did not feature a "Park" range, making it necessary to use the handbrake whenever the car was parked. All Chrysler products at the time had a parking brake independent from the vehicle's wheel brakes, a single brake drum mounted on the driveshaft, just behind the transmission. This had the (intended) effect of locking both rear wheels in the same way that the "Park" setting did in other transmissions.