I'm very interested in any projects you are doing, so I will follow them as well if you post them. What are the other websites?

I, too have been going through withdrawals on your project blogs! I'm following both this one and your '55.

"The last Packard Detroit car was a Patrician, VN #5682-4775. It apparently has not survived."

Thank you for that - this is the VIN I remembered, but I wasn't confident of it and didn't want to post it incorrectly. I keep hoping that car will turn up, but I fear you are correct that it has not survived.

The colors were chosen by the styling department and approved by management. There is a hilarious story of how "Phartedon White" (say it aloud) almost became an interior color for Packard in THIS THREAD:
https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9210&forum=4

Packard stylist Ed Cunningham was in on the joke above and he was the one who came up with the very rare "Carnation and Amethyst" color combo for 1954. We know for sure that five 1954 Packard Pacific hardtops were built in this color combo. It appears that as many as 50 were approved for production but there is some debate as to whether or not they were actually built. One of these Pacific hardtops was recently donated to the Packard Proving Grounds.

In another thread on this forum is a discussion about a special color for the Spring selling season of 1956, a flamingo pink which was lighter than the "Scottish Heather" that was a standard color for 1956. Few of the flamingo cars were built because the color got lost in the fact that Packard was shutting down about the time the color was offered.

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Packard in Detroit closed on 26 June, 1956. It was a bitter end to a proud marque. Had Packard been able to launch the '57s they had planned, those cars would have been the most advanced production cars of their day. Features that didn't become common until the mid-'60s and even into the '70s would have been standard on these Packards - fuel injection being one.

For 1957 and 1958, there were "Packards" built on the Studebaker President chassis and body shell at the Studebaker plant in South Bend, Indiana.

I've been trying to upload a photo of the "Packard" truck, but I'm having trouble doing it.

The absolute last Detroit-built Packard was a '56 Patrician 4 door, VIN 5682=4xxx. (I don't have the last 3 digits of the VIN at hand.) To the best of my knowledge, the fate of this car remains unknown.

The last Studebaker-built "Packards" were a pair of special-order pickup trucks with Packard badges attached that went to South America, Argentina if my memory is correct.

Dilbert <a href="http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-01-21">does the Astral</a>:

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Very interesting!
Around 1997 or so, there was a pink and white Executive 4 door sedan that seemed to have been abandoned in the parking lot by the toll booths of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It sat there for weeks. At the time, I was commuting to work in San Francisco from the East Bay. I kept wanting to stop and inquire if anyone there at the toll plaza knew anything about the car, but when I was passing by it, there was never a convenient time to pull over and ask. Then the car disappeared. I took note of it because I knew that it wasn't Scottish Heather and Dover White - it was a different pink. Now I REALLY wish I had made an effort to learn the story about this car!

There is, in fact, a reason that there are some similarities between the '55-'56 Packards and the '56 Lincoln. Although, as was pointed out, the '56 Lincoln design had been "locked in," Nance had hired William Schmidt away from Ford for Packard Styling and Schmidt arrived in time to have some influence on the update of Teague's masterful '55 design for '56. (Bringing Schmidt on board must have rattled Teague, though I've never seen any account of it having done so, nor have I ever seen any account of any rivalry between Schmidt and Teague. Apparently they got on well together. ) Schmidt had done the Lincoln Futura show car - the one that George Barris later turned into the original Batmobile. Schmidt was very involved in the development of the Predictor design and in the design of the unbuilt '57 Packards.