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Mahoning, I enjoy your adaptations. Most clever. I have posted before that a "what if" I favor is adapting a senior Mercedes Benz to look like a Packard. Those early 1960s MB sedans were, in my mind, most attractive. True the styling is dated, but they have quality written all over. I wonder what one of these Benzs would look like with Packard-like sheet metal on the front and rear and of course the classic grille. This could have happened with the partnership S-P had with MB at the time.

All of this kinda reminds me of the discussions that take place about the CSA winning the Civil War. Always fun to speculate, but we all know the outcome. Still...

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All of this kinda reminds me of the discussions that take place about the CSA winning the Civil War. Always fun to speculate, but we all know the outcome. Still...


Indeed. I spent last year trying to learn as much as I could about all the independents in the 50s. The bottom line:

Kaiser: no hope. Henry Kaiser's hubris doomed the company.

Packard: acquires Hudson. Packard the larger company so would not have the split management priorities that S-P had. Gain the body plant Packard needed. Gain an established mid-market brand that Nance wanted. Gain dealers. Gain installed base of Hudsons to feed profitable service parts business.

Nash: acquires Studebaker. Consolidate powertrain production in South Bend to clear enough footprint in Kenosha to build a body assembly and paint plant at the assembly plant. Consolidate final assembly at Kenosha. Use Milwaukee and South Bend stamping facilities. Nash gains a V8. Nash gains dealers and service parts business. Nash gains a truck line. Would only work with Nash in control, and I can't find what Nash's book value and market cap were, compared to Studebaker in 54.

Then there is the idea of Studebaker buying Willys before Kaiser did in spring 53. Haven't given it much thought, but consolidating Studebaker truck with Jeep in Toledo, using the Aero as the basis for a "new Champion" and leveraging it's unibody platform for a new generation of Studebakers is interesting.

JW - here's a quickie with Request grill grafted in and fender skirts; gives hint of what a Packard might have looked like. The M-Bs in these years were more like early-50s American cars to my eye, makes me wonder what the 1951 Packard 200 might have looked like with traditional Packard or even Mercedes grill, might have made a nice looking larger M-B throughout most of the decade.

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Steve203 - interesting suggestion for Studebaker-Willys trucks and leveraging Aero platform, makes sense.

My take-away from all these what-ifs is that there were many paths to success for Packard and probably just as many dead ends. Flash forward to today and one can see a similar magnitude of possibilities for Cadillac, Lincoln, Chrysler, Infiniti and others trying to take it to the next level.

there were many paths to success for Packard and probably just as many dead ends.

Based on the number of failed automakers in the US, vs the number of survivors, it's probably more like 1 path to success for 100 paths to failure.

similar magnitude of possibilities for Cadillac, Lincoln, Chrysler, Infiniti and others

I have been watching events at Chrysler, aka FCA, with great interest. Between the several model delays, the fact that FCA spends 1.5% of revenue on product development vs 4.5% at Ford and GM, plus FCA's poor profit margins, plus FCA's large debt burden, it's no surprise that the company is being shopped so aggressively. Given the path they are on, I expect Chrysler as we know it to be gone in about 5 years. Either sold entirely to the Chinese, or Jeep sold to Ford or GM and Fiat sold to the Chinese, or the company broke and looking for another government bailout.

It was a consistent lack of investment in new product that started Packard, Studebaker, Hudson, Curtiss-Wright and Hall-Scott all circling the drain.

Hi

At Ford, positioning Packard would have been the easier decision: above the volume-luxury Lincoln, on par in price and prestige with Continental Mark. The differentiation would be Packard as primarily competition for Cadillac 60 Special and Eldorado, and Imperial LeBaron, built as variations on the Lincoln platform. The Continental Marks then become an extension of the unibody Thunderbird as personal luxury coupe and convertible only, appealing to different sub-groups within that $7K-$8K range.

Clipper could have been a more difficult fit. The E-Car project was well along by mid-'56, the internal political momentum to stay with it as the Edsel could have shunted Clipper. Better would have been to make the E-Car the new Clipper or select a new name which came with it: Constellation. Lockheed's Constellation airliners were in commercial service at the time, evoked a modern image. de Havilland's Comet, among the early jetliners, presented a similar image. Either suggested something more modern than Clipper. If whatever the upper-medium car was named was still advertised as part of the Packard-( ) Division, vertical grille themes should have been their styling exclusive.

As the late-'50's-early-'60's market was undergoing major shifts: burgeoning acceptance of small import cars and domestic compacts, the medium-priced segment underwent a major hit and consolidations. McNamara seemed to be bent on dismissing or significantly diminishing everything not a Ford. The '61 Mercury was reduced to barely more than a redecorated Ford, analogous to the Plymouth-based '60 Dodge Dart, uncompetitive with Pontiac to any degree. With that redirecting of Mercury, Ford abandoned the upper-medium segment covered by the Montclair and Park Lane, what might have been Clipper's domain. Where Clipper might have lived under that regime is anyone's guess.

Becoming a 'senior' compact or a luxury intermediate may well have been its fate. If Ford had fielded such a car then, it definitely would have had to up their game in engineering and craftsmanship to attract those early M-B and BMW adopters. Mercury had the confusion of the 'senior' compact, Falcon-based Comet (114" wb, 194.8" O.L), joined in '62 by Fairlane-based, intermediate Meteor (116.5"wb, 203.8" O.L.): two nearly identical cars. Dissipating with the '64 Comets, Meteors receded to north of the border again. It's hard to imagine Iacocca being prescient enough that early to see the vague outline of the coming "International-Sized" performance-luxury car segment.

"...leveraging Willys Aero platform, makes sense."

Backing up to the lost potential of the Willys Aero to the U.S market, a Studebaker purchase of W-O might have lost Jeep if they managed it as they did their automaking operations. While the Aero platform could have been developed into a competitive Champion and eventual Lark, purchase of the Murray body operation would have had to be part of the package, as Murray exited auto bodymaking in 1955. The big plus, it would have given South Bend an entree into unibodies that could have served them well developing a truly competitive compact to oppose the 1960 Big Three compacts.

Perhaps more useful would have been Nash-Kelvinator/AMC purchase of Willys-Overland a decade plus before it happened. Integrating another unibody platform into the company fully familiar with it much easier. The Aero platform in this case could have been developed into a more modern Rambler American while the '54 Nash Ramber sedan/wagon 108" wb platform morphed into the '56 'senior' Ramblers. Jeep's trucks and CJ's would have been a prefect compliment to the AMC compacts throughout the '60's, carried them over their many rough patches.

Steve

Hi Steve - lots of good points to ponder, thanks. Yes, Packard would have fit nicely above Lincoln and positioned to take on 60 Special while Continental was continued as 4-pass Thunderbird-based personal luxury coupe/convertible. Clipper, or Son of Clipper in whatever name chosen would have been a tough sell given lack of name recognition, one reason Ford needed Packard.

Ford's inconsistent model and pricing strategy between 1957-1961 speaks to what you said about Mercury being reduced to a nice Ford (again), which hurt FoMoCo on many levels. In 1959 the highest priced Mercury was $4,000 while the lowest priced Lincoln was $5,000. In 1961 the highest Merc was $3,000 while the lowest Lincoln was $6,000. In other words the company went from a $1,000 to a $3,000 price gap overnight and walked away from the market that Olds 98, Buick Electra and Chrysler New Yorker played in. Fascinating.

Also fascinating is the fact that the '58-60 Lincolns - the official stinky years for Lincoln according to historians - accomplished an automotive miracle of sorts: the Continental version, Lincoln's first post-war car priced in 60 Special's league, actually sold well against that powerhouse. Consider this: the 1960 Continental Mk V - the only Lincoln still with slant roof and breezeway backlight while rest of Lincoln had new C-pillar design - cut 60 Special's sales lead to less than 2:1 despite Mk V's $400 higher price vs 60 Special. Wow, a 3-year old design giving Cadillac a run for its money... and outselling all the other (less expensive) Lincoln models! This suggests that its basic design had both pricing and staying power and would have suited Packard well.

The year 1959 was also the year Cadillac made its first mistake with 60 Special by taking away its longer wheelbase and giving it the Sedan DeVille's body. The body differentiation was corrected in 1961 with a unique formal roof but the wheelbase didn't get corrected until 1965.

In retrospect, these were the years that Ford had opportunity to really put the hurt on Chrysler, Olds 98, Buick Electra and Cadillac. Instead it all but ran away, not only through loss of upper-medium Mercurys but by Lincoln's new pricing strategy in 1961 that put it way above Series 62 and somewhat below 60 Special, a policy continued in the Seventies and one reason why Lincoln 4-door sales never came close to Cadillac. I think Lincoln had a chance beginning in 1959 to yank Park Lane from Mercury and fill some of that $1,000 to $3,000 price gap. The Lincoln name was above Olds, Buick and Chrysler and the Park Lane had the makings of a very nice Lincoln that the luxury market would have found a great car and a good value.

Here's a quick before/after stab at '58 Continental taking the not-very-creative approach of reusing T-Bird inner structure and borrowing '56 Conti Mk II styling elements. Interior would have needed to bedazzle with jeweled instrumentation and wool carpet and leather from pampered Scottish cattle.

EDIT: added 3 inches to hood/wheelbase.

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Here's an article on Continental Mk II planning and selected quotes including comment from former Packard stylist Reinhart.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1956-1957-lincoln-continental-mark-210.htm

"By 1958, the future of the Lincoln Continental Mark II was clearly doomed. Bob Thomas neatly summarizes the situation in his candid autobiography, Confessions of an Automobile Stylist:

'We were working our asses off to make the car a success, and if management hadn't put so many stumbling blocks in our way, we might have succeeded. GM lost money every year on the Corvette, but they kept it going as a prestige plus. We at Continental had to make money on the car from the start, which was a ridiculous assumption.'

Predictably, cost experts went to work on making the Continental a money-maker. The result was the 1958 Mark III, a spiffier version of that year's new unit-body Lincoln, with boxy, undistinguished lines and the same king-size 131-inch wheelbase.

Left stillborn were several Mark II extensions to supplement the original hardtop, which would have continued in the 1958 lineup initially envisioned. Said Reinhart: 'It was so perfect a design that we felt it could go as long as 10 years.'"


This supports the idea of continuing the same theme into 1958 as shown in previous post. My question is, did they consider making the next Continental off '58 T-Bird or did the premise behind Continental include being full-sized? I can't quite agree with Mr. Thomas that a money-making Conti was a ridiculous assumption. Few cars fall into the category of advertising and therefore ought be paid for out of advertising budget. Shame on the designers for not getting ahead of the bean counters and pulling together a 1958 proposal that made money and kept true to the Continental dream. The designers could have been excused for the original Mk II being a money-loser but not its successor, not when they had so many low-slung production platforms to work with. Part of their problem was that they started thinking large 4-door, which should have been the Lincoln division's concern (and Packard's had it been acquired).

Steve - to see how my earlier proposed Wixom-based unibody Packard would stack up with your proposed BoF version based on Mercury, here's a glimpse of 1959-60 Packard. The C-pillar would have played a key role in helping differentiate Mercury, Lincoln and Packard. Merc was carrying two C-pillars in these years including the one shown and the one in earlier post of Park Lane, which I think would have been perfect for Lincoln. The Packard version shown here would have come from same stamping as Merc.

This Packard would have been the follow-on to hurriedly designed 1957-58 Turnpike Cruiser-based Packard. I think this and the Wixom Packard both work, this one having the major benefit of sharing internal structure and windshield with Mercury and Lincoln while Wixom car would have had many more unique parts. Sharing with Olds and Buick was an important element of Cadillac's financial success.

Note the windshield in '59-60 Mercury... near spit'n image of Predictor!

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