Oldsmobile kicked it off with the restyled Futuramic Rocket 88. It included the Hydramatic automatic transmission and a brand-new V-8 engine. Now, neither was new. Olds introduced the automatic transmission in 1940 and it had been building V-8’s since 1932, but the two things hadn’t been put together in a designed-from-the-chassis up vehicle. In addition, the Rocket V-8 was the first overhead-valve design, allowing the engine to take up much less space and producing less vibration when accelerating. It also had an AM radio that could sorta kinda be heard with the top down at cruising speed maybe if you had lots of imagination. y father, therefore, wanted one. But they were hard to find in February of 1949. Yet the above pic from 1949 shows that he got one. (Well, actually the Rocket 76 with the Big Six engine.) Only wanting is not having. How did he make that leap?