Packard Motor Car Company: A Spiteful Start to the Studebaker Merger

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1899 engineer James Ward Packard complained about his car to its maker, Alexander Winton, who told him to build his own. James and his brother William built their first car in Warren, Ohio, late that year, and Henry Bourne Joy brought in Detroit investors and moved the company to Detroit by 1902. Albert Kahn designed a 40-acre reinforced concrete plant whose Building 10 brought more than 80 trades under one roof. Packards started at $2,600 when the Oldsmobile runabout sold for about $650, and under Alvan Macauley the brand became one of the three P's of American luxury with Peerless and Pierce-Arrow, advertised with the line Ask the Man Who Owns One. By 1931 the Imperial House of Japan owned 10 of them.

Shared components helped Packard survive the Depression, and the under-$1,000 Packard 120 of 1935 tripled sales but diluted the brand. In World War II it built Rolls-Royce Merlin V-1650 engines for the P-51 Mustang and V-12 engines for PT boats, more than 55,000 combat engines in all, and ended the war with about $33 million in assets. It then fielded the bulky 1948 styling nicknamed the pregnant elephant, kept flathead straight eights while Cadillac moved to an overhead valve V8, and spent heavily on its own Ultramatic transmission. Former Hotpoint executive James Nance merged with Studebaker in 1954 and launched a V8 and Torsion-Level suspension for 1955, but body supplier Briggs had gone to Chrysler and quality suffered. The last Detroit Packard was built on June 25, 1956.

• By the early 1950s the board's average age was 67, partly because executives had no pension plan.
• Nance's first act was creating a pension plan, and he moved mid-priced models under the Clipper name.
• Studebaker's multi-story South Bend plants needed about 250,000 sales a year to break even.
• The 1957 and 1958 Studebaker-based cars were mocked as Packardbakers, and 1958 sales totaled 2,622 before production ended on July 16, 1958.
• Packard's electrical connector division became part of GM's Delphi, which evolved into Aptiv.