How did the greatest American luxury carmaker of the 1920s and 1930s disappear just a few decades later?
Packard, once America’s premier luxury carmaker, is largely forgotten today, with recent headlines about the long-delayed demolition of its long-abandoned Detroit production plant serving as a dim reminder of the former automotive titan. The wiping away of those ruins gives occasion, however, to look back at Packard’s storied history and the monumental cars they built along the way.
Packard’s story begins with the Packard brothers, James and William, of Warren, Ohio, who, along with their business partner George Weiss, founded their automobile company in 1899. The Ohio Automobile Company, as it was initially called, had a genesis similar to that of Lamborghini, beginning with a bit of unsolicited advice poorly received.
After having bought an automobile from Winton Motor Carriage Company, of Cleveland, OH, James Packard found the car to be less than reliable. In his efforts to keep the car running, he discovered some possible design improvements and suggested them personally to Alexander Winton. Winton rebuffed the advice, telling Packard to “go build one himself.” And so, Packard did.
Packard’s first car, completed in 1899, used a tiller for steering and rode on large bicycle wheels. The company’s first innovation was swapping out that tiller for the first ever steering wheel on their next model. After four years and approximately 400 cars built, the company moved to Detroit, Michigan and was renamed the Packard Motor Car Company.
Packard’s slogan, “Just Ask the Man Who Owns One,” befit a business strategy of marketing their cars as exclusive and refined luxury items. A $2,500 price tag put them in competition with the likes of Rolls-Royce and Pierce-Arrow and rose to upwards of $4,000 by 1906. To compete in this elite realm, Packard introduced their first six-cylinder car, the Packard Six, in 1913, followed by the twelve-cylinder Twin-Six in 1916 (the first V12 in a production car). A year later, Packard expanded to building airplane and marine engines as part of the WWI war effort.
Packard grew to become America’s top luxury mark of the 1920s. Despite the success and popularity of the Twin-Six, in 1923 Packard introduced a new engine and a new car to go with it, the Packard Eight featuring an exceptionally smooth-running 319 cu-in straight-eight making a full 90 horsepower. The Eight set Packard on a path to a $12 million dollar profit in 1925. By 1929, that figure had jumped to $25 million. Packard’s reputation for reliability and luxury had spread around the world.
The stock market crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression posed a problem for prestigious carmakers like Packard. The solution for Packard, Ford, Cadillac, and others was to build ever more beautiful cars with ever more powerful engines. This is why some of the most opulent and impressive cars in automotive history hale from a decade best known for its tough economic times.
Packard’s approach was to simultaneously move both up and down market. They reintroduced the Twin-Six to compete with a slew of new V12- and V16-engined cars from competitors. And Packard’s typically understated styling gave way to ever more elaborate and elegant bespoke designs, among them builds by Dietrich and Le Baron, the “Aero Sport Coupe” with its teardrop aerodynamics, and the subsequent Gentleman’s Tailback Speedster designed by Howard “Dutch” Darrin hand couch built by Fernandez & Darrin of Paris.
By the middle of the decade, Packard sought to expand sales with a move down market with the introduction of the One-Twenty. Priced under $1,000, the One-Twenty was by far the most affordable Packard ever. The One-Twenty was a hit, providing Packard with its best sales year ever, selling some 109,000 units in 1937.
In the late 1930s, as some at Packard, like ex-GM executive George Christopher, were pushing the company toward more mass production, the company was still making stunning custom, couch-built cars. Designer Howard “Dutch” Darrin, of the above Tailback, had been consulting with Packard on these high-end designs, and the company liked his work enough to request his help with a new, mainstream car, the Clipper.
Debuting in 1941, history intervened and after a truncated production of some 16,000 Clippers, all output at Packard was shifted to war production. Contracts to provide engines for P-51 Mustangs and PT boats were lucrative for Packard and the company exited the war with $33 million dollars in assets.
And yet, Packard was flatfooted in the late 1940s, failing to offer new models with the same speed as Ford, GM, and the rest. Sales were strong for nearly all carmakers in the post-war boom. The Clipper name was dropped for the redesigned ’48 Twenty-Two. The bulky new body had the press referring to it as a “upside down bathtub” and MotorTrend’s reviewer calling the car “a goat.” The company did put resources toward developing their own automatic transmission, the Ultramatic, which debuted in 1949. It is speculated that this project kept Packard from building their own competing V8 to replace their aging straight-eight.
In the early 1950s, Detroit’s Big Three had entered a period of intense competition. With huge production runs and year-over-year design changes, smaller carmakers like Packard found it hard to compete. Packard did introduce new cars for 1951, the 200, 250, 300, and 400 models aiming to go up against the likes of DeSoto and Buick for the mid-market segment. This had the unfortunate side effect of further eroding Packard’s reputation for high-end luxury. The brief tenure of the sumptuous Caribbean convertible was not enough to reclaim the mark’s former glory.
Packard’s president James Nance hoped a merger with another mid-sized carmaker would help them better compete with the giants like Ford and GM. He had a likeminded cohort in his former competitor from his days at the appliance company Hotpoint, Nash-Kelvinator president George Mason. Mason’s plan was to join Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson with Studebaker and Packard to form American Motors Corporation and become the country’s third largest automaker, surpassing Chrysler’s position.
Mason’s sudden illness and untimely death in 1954 saw him succeeded by George Romney as head of the new AMC. Romney was cool to the addition of Packard and Studebaker and wrangling over parts sharing complicated talks, which eventually broke down. With the larger merger off the table, Packard went ahead and joined up with Studebaker, hoping to leverage Studebaker’s dealership network as their own had shrunk by approximately 30 percent by 1956.
Unfortunately for Packard, it turned out Studebaker had been less than transparent about the nature of their financials. They had been unable to turn a profit for years, able to build just 82,000 units in 1954, not quite a third of the way to their break-even point.
Things were looking grim at Studebaker-Packard by 1956. After failing to secure funds for new tooling for Packard (forcing the company to use Studebaker’s), Nance resigned and production was shifted to Studebaker’s HQ in South Bend, Indiana. The company leveraged what remained of the Packard name in 1957 and ‘58, creating “Packardbakers,” basically Studebaker Presidents build with some Packard parts and Packard badging. The final 1958 model sold just 2,622 units before Studebaker-Packard folded the Packard division. The Packard name was officially dropped from the company in 1962 with the release of the new Studebaker Avanti coupe.
It was an ignominious end for Packard. But look back to their heyday in the 1920s and 30s and you will find some of the most gorgeous and well-engineered cars of their time, staggering designs still capable of capturing our imaginations today.