9 Weirdest Differentials Ever Built - One Had No Gears

Nine differentials and drivetrains that somebody actually built, and the real engineering reason each one died. A differential is the little cluster of gears that lets your two wheels turn at different speeds when you go round a corner. Take it away and the car fights itself. These nine are what happens when engineers took it away anyway, hid it somewhere strange, or made it do something it was never meant to do. A pickup differential with no spider gears at all, that welds both rear wheels together the instant you touch the throttle and lets go when you lift. A car from 1900 with no gearbox, no driveshaft and no differential of any kind, because the motors were inside the wheels. A four hundred horsepower American barge that sent its drive to the front wheels through a two-inch chain. And the only four-wheel-drive car ever to win a Formula One race, built by a man who made tractors. Full list, in order: the Detroit Locker - the Lohner-Porsche wheel-hub motors - the Oldsmobile Toronado's Hy-Vo chain - the Ferguson P99. Then: the cam-and-pawl racing differential, the Columbia two-speed rear axle, Harry Miller's front-drive Indianapolis cars, Mitsubishi's Active Yaw Control, and the four-part Tracta joint that made front-wheel drive possible and then lost to something easier to manufacture. Every one of them ended differently: a part that survived by emigrating, an idea a century too early, a layout beaten on packaging, a rulebook, wear, an accountant, and a part count. CHAPTERS 0:00 Detroit Locker - The Banger 1:24 Lohner-Porsche hub motors - The Hubs 2:44 Oldsmobile Toronado chain - The Chain 4:10 Ferguson P99 four-wheel drive - The Tractor Man 5:47 Cam-and-pawl differential - The Clatter 7:30 Columbia two-speed axle - The Stowaway 8:58 Miller front-drive Indy cars - The Ghost 10:35 Mitsubishi Active Yaw Control - The Shove 12:07 Tracta constant-velocity joint - The Four Parts 14:02 Send it to the scrapyard If you like mechanisms explained properly - what the parts actually do, and why the clever ones lost - subscribe. That is the whole channel. A NOTE ON THE FACTS Every machine here was checked against sources before a word was written, and several things we believed at the start turned out to be wrong. The Toronado's chain was not a weak point, it ran for twenty years. Front-wheel drive did not lose at Indianapolis on merit, it was killed by cost and a rule change. The Ferguson P99's Formula One win was a non-championship race, and we say so rather than quietly dropping the word. Where sources genuinely disagree - the exact high ratio of the Columbia axle, where the brakes sat on Miller's 1925 car, whether Mitsubishi or Honda shipped torque vectoring first - we say they disagree instead of picking the tidier answer. ABOUT THE PICTURES Most of these mechanisms live inside a sealed casing, and several of the machines no longer exist in any form you can photograph. Where a real photograph exists, we use it. Where one does not, the picture is a reconstruction built from patents, service manuals and sourced technical descriptions - an illustration of the machine, not a photograph of it. We would rather show you an honest reconstruction than a black screen. If we have drawn a detail wrong, say so in the comments. Corrections from previous videos went straight into how this one was made. #differential #engineering #cars