Packard’s Visions of the Future, When It Still Had One
 

A great slideshow in today's Times... Packard concept cars:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/09/13/automobiles/collectibles/20090913-packard_index.html

Nice, Packard for a time proved the we can build the best cars in the world.

You know what they used to advertise; "Packard, ask the man who owns one!":D


For awhile they were so confident that they didn't even put logo's on their cars.

utilitarianism sucks

too bad we can't have cars like that anymore

Whoa, some of those are pretty strange. In photo two, the ones on the right and left. Gawd.

A couple of the others are all right.

Packard had a tight relationship with Henney coachbuilders, they built googobs of hearses, flower cars and ambulances. When Packard went belly-up, so did Henney.

Oddly enough, we are in a similar situation now with Cadillac. The DTS is going out of production, and GM seems content to let Lincoln have the hearse and limo market. There will be no Cadillacs on commercial chassis after this year. Lincoln will phase out the Town Car after 2011 or 2012, after that, no telling whose car chassis will be used for hearses and limousines...maybe Lexus and Mercedes?! Either that, or SUV-based chassis...Escalade hearses.

Anyway, professional cars have always been halo products for upscale American brands...you want your last ride to be in the best car possible, after all.

Interesting, you could argue that GM did the same thing in the 90's with the police car/taxicab segment - They killed the Caprice/Caprice Classic...

So did they intentionally kill it - or did the follow the (bad?) advice of a marketer/moneyshuffler who said "go with a smaller FWD platform and the police departments will buy those...Oh, and don't forget to abandon the full size sedans for Body-on-frame SUV's - they'll sell better."

-John

It should be interesting...I guess GM figures 2000 hearse chassis a year, plus how ever many limo chassis, don't justify building big sedans, even though consumers will still buy the cars too. Same thing as 1996, when the big RWD Brougham went out of production, along with the Caprice and Roadmonster, all of which were the basis for hearses. Only problem is, the remaining GM sedans are too narrow, both in the body shells themselves, and the space between the rear strut towers, to be good hearse chassis. Further, GM has always been really good about beefing-up the commercial chassis, for instance, new FWD hearses have 8-lug wheels and bigger brakes than the sedans, I think the transmissions are even geared differently, to account for the additional weight. Ford has always done less for their commercial chassis...cop car cooling and brakes, and that's about it.

You may recall that funeral directors were freaked out in 1976, when the downsized 1977 Cadillacs were coming out, they thought they were too small, and looked funny...now the 1977-1991 Caddies seem huge, so maybe someone will engineer something that will enable smaller chassis to be used successfully for hearses.

"Ask this man who owned one!"

PHOTO TWO, FAR-LEFT!
That was a production car and I owned one!

A 1955 Caribbean Convertible. That one was 3-tone coral and mine was 3-tone green.

It was awesome! They were great highway cars, 4-wheel torsion bar suspension, (no coil springs, no leaf springs), automatic load-leveling, power top, windows seats and twin tail-fin antennae!

The radio would automatically seek the stations much like today's cars.

Would you believe they had TWO 4-Barrel Carbs sitting on top of a 352 cid V-8?

I want mine to be in an all black, crew cab, dually Cummins with stacks. :)

Hmmmm...might be a market for that for us hicks...and limos for the weddings and proms...:D

I'm still astonished by the antiquity of the fleet vehicles in this country....the average Ford Police car is a primitive body on chassis design that's absolutely ancient, and massively inefficient (fuelwise) compared to European Police vehicles etc...

The Packard Crest was used through out their run

http://www.cartype.com/pics/2954/small/packard.gif

Also do not forget the red 'hex nut' which symbolized superior engineering...

Look at the wheel hubcaps to see it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Sedan_1934.jpg

On a related topic I passed two Studebakers yesterday on I-78 in Pa.

Talk about stylish!

They were both Lowey Coupes

One early one without fins and one later finned one.


Both looked good on the road

Both kept up with 75mph traffic!

This one has a scary face:(.....if he was tailgating me, I'd let him pass.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/package...d/29807536.JPG

The cost of cutting quality and increasing complexity
 

Having owned a 1956 Packard Executive, I owned the last Packard (excluding South Bend built Packabakers) model introduced. It was most certainly the end product of making the most complex product possible. It was a nightmare to keep working properly.

Up until 1954, the Packard straight eight was the most reliable US engine built. The bodies were well built by Budd.

In 1955, the company hit the perfect storm. Budd was bought by Chrysler and would not build bodies for Packard, so Packard built there own bodies with some difficulty and expensive design upgrades. Packard marketing decided that V-8's would sell better that straight eights, so a very problemsome V-8 replaced the the reliable straight 8. A change was made to a posi-trac rear end made by Dana-Spicer. These had a life span of about 10,000 miles due to improperly hardened parts.

Around this time Packard introduced power seats, power windows, power locks, a funky air conditioning system with the condensor in the truck and vents behind the rear seat, a search and seek radio from Delco, power brakes with the booster under the floorboard, a weird automatic transmission with two methods of operation and a pushbutton shifter. All of these things had problems. The torsion bar suspension with a self-leveler was great. It was later used by Rolls Royce.

The dramatic increase in problems experienced by buyers in 1955 killed Packard's reputation for quality and by June, 1956 it was merely a nameplate to put on Studebaker products.

A similar pattern can be found elsewhere. Mercedes has experienced this phenomenon. Read the posts from owners of 300D's with manual transmissions and those from owners of 1986 and later diesels. After being very reliable in the '80's, in the 90's, VW's became service nightmares. A mid '80's Subaru was an easily serviced indestructable mountain goat, by 1995, a Subaru was servicable only and often by dealer-trained midgets.

All of the companies who go for complexity lose market share and their reputations for quality.

If the Chinese are smart, their first cars into the US will be simple and user friendly. Henry Ford is still not a bad instructor about how to make money building cars.

A friend of mine is the curator of the Auburn Cord Duesenburg Automobile Museum. Except for his 1998 Jag the other drivers at his house are Mercs. At the museum he talks Auburn Cord Duesenburg, but when you get him out of there his opinion is 'back in the day there was Packard and then there was everything else'. He used to be president of the USA Packard club. As far as he is concerned there have only been two automotive makes....Packard and Mercedes (and he owns a 1998 Jag and 1932 Roller).

BTW in my opinion one of the greatest pieces at the museum is a model J Duesenburg that has over 250,000 miles:D.

See
automobilemuseum.org

I find it interesting that you had a nightmare. 55 and 56 were virtually identical. We had troublle with the transmission on our 55 Caribbean convertible, as did everyone, but other than that, it was a wonderful and reliable car. Maintenance was rather routine with a water pump that was easy to change, brake shoes and wheel cylinder kits and an occasional OZ4 tube in that wonderful Delco Radio. I did pretty much all of the maintenance myself as a teen-ager, which made dad pretty happy!

Oh! It did manage to throw the harmonic balancer once, but so did my 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee...

I do recall that those unfortunate enough to have the push button transmission had LOTS of problems.

I was lucky enough to have obtained the factory service manual. I think part of the problems people experienced was that with the failure of the company, and no more dealerships, there were few shops that knew what they were doing when it came to maintenance.

A 55 Patrician and a 56 Clipper Deluxe were later added to the family fleet.
These were out daily drivers in the 60's and early 70's.

The last two photos in the link to the start of the article are Lincoln Mark bodies. Just before the last coffin nail Packard was working with Ford for their bodies. (ehw:freak:) The new Fordard or is it Packford.

I love how back in the day American built the best cars in the world. A pre war Packard was just as good if not better than anything Europe made.

Cadillac and Duesenburg were just as good as anything Rolls Royce or Mercedes made before WW2. They certianly were more advanced than Mercedes.

Remember even the big blown 540k's only had a bit more than 1/3 the power a blown Duesenburg had. Mercedes also didn't have a V12 or V16, GM and Packard did.

540k 1/3 the power of a duesie? That seems unlikely.

The Lowey coupes were the best looking the first year...53. My dad had one back when it was a couple of years old. Great styling, not equalled until decades later. Lousey brakes and nose heavy with the v8 though.

At the Hershey AACA Fall meet a few years ago, I saw a Dusenberg rolling chassis. What caught my eye were the rag joints in the driveline--just like used on my 300SD.

Ok maybe not quite, I think it was 320 vs 180.:D

I tried to find more info about the power and performance of the two cars and found hard facts hard to come by.

Most 540s were big sedans or cabrios made more for touring than high speed, but there were short wheelbase 2 seaters which were raced extensively, the fastest being the 540sskl which was supercharged, lightweight and short wheelbase. I read one place where they were capable of over 130 mph.

Most Duesies were also road cars but there were a small number that were more performance oreinted as well, though the racing was more likely to be done by pure open wheel racing cars with Duesie engines like at Indy where a number of different configurations of engines were built.

I believe the performance of the fastest Mercedes and Duesies was very similar. In fact there was a very famous Mercedes owned by Zeppo Marx (one of the Marx brothers comedy team) which participated in a match race at Muroc dry lake against a Duesie. The Duesie won but the driver and mechanic of Zeppo's 540k swore that it was because he could not get the right spark plugs for the Mercedes and that the Mercedes was the better car.

I think the 540sskl was probably a lot lighter than a ssj Duesie. The merecedes was raced on road courses at a time when in the US circle track racing was the dominant form of racing and non existant in Europe so they had different empahsis in their design.

Both superb cars, both the best at what they were built for.

A little general history on Duesenburg. Fred and Augie just wanted to race. They had their own high end car make to fund their race ventures, but the company was failing although the cars were great. For example at the museum there is a 1926 model A Duesenburg. It has 4 wheel hydraulic brakes and 88HP from only 289cu in. Back then that was a lot of power and made even more impressive that it came from such small displacement. But, then realize that this is a make from two men absorbed with racing. The price on this car was $6500 which is roughly $76,000 today. For comparison at the same time you could get a Model T for $300.

Both the Model A and Model J Duesenburg I8 engines have one feature in common. The valve covers are held on my large threaded knobs for quick access to the valve train.

Here is a puzzler for you to figure out. Next time you see a Model J look for the brake line that supplys the front brake cylinders.....you woun't find any......:D

As advanced as Duesenburgs were Packards were slow to change.....don't fix what ain't broke...
To me the best example of this is Packard's approach to 4 wheel brakes. At the time when companies started going to 4 wheel mechanical brakes Packard resisted. The primary arguments were first, most driving that is done is not at speeds that necessitate the addition of brakes at the front wheels and second, many of the 4 wheel brake systems that were available were troublesome resulting not not providing much benefit.

This resistance did not make the dealers happy because sales were being lost. Finally, after complaints from the dealers the company decided to develop a 4 wheel brake system, but the car was it had to be perfect. By the time Packard introduced 4 wheel mechanical brakes it was not much time until Chrysler (at a much lower price) introduced 4 wheel hydraulic brakes. Now Packard at least by appearance is behind the next technology wave. Everything that I have read on Packard states that their 4 wheel mechanical brakes were so much better than other makes.

Check out this video from Jay Leno
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/video_player.shtml?vid=188063
Pay attention to his comments about the mechanical brakes on this 1932 Packard. And automatic clutch, too.:D
I would love to have a Packard.