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By the time '55's of decent quality and sufficient supply became available,

In the back of my mind is the persistent thought that the debottlenecking at the plant and improved build quality was more a matter of falling production rates, rather than improved operations. The workers had more time to do the job properly on the line, and more time was available to repair build problems at the plant, rather than fob the repairs off on the dealers.

Does anyone have monthly production numbers for Conner? Not monthly dealer sales, but how many the plant got out the door?

Don't know Steve203 but you may well be right, a very interesting observation.

I have a question too... how did Packard, the master engine builder, come to launch a flawed engine? They had been planning it since before Nance arrived in May, '52.

Steve - glad you like the concept and nice job highlighting the many bold moves Cadillac made. They earned their position through years of hard work, focus and some gutsy product calls. They were led by car guys, of which Nance took too long to become one if he ever did at all. He blew '54, which really set Packard back, and despite 2-1/2 years to prepare, was late and rushed in getting out the '55s.

There were arguably many plausible paths to Packard success, and this forum through the years has probably hit most of them. In thinking more broadly about the Hudson connection, perhaps Nance should have stopped letting himself get pressured by Mason into aligning to Mason's grand and rather self-serving, or at least Nash-centric plan, and instead reached out to Barit soon after taking the job, recognizing that it was Hudson and not Nash that was directly below Packard in stature and that it was Hudson's timing for a major redesign and not Nash's that was perfectly aligned with Packard's. Barit was a good manager and ran a tight ship that made a consistently high quality and innovative product at a fair price. His plant had a capacity of 300,000 cars per year and he sold 142,000 fairly expensive cars three years in a row. He had a fatal flaw that came out in the Jet. Oh oh, news flash... humans have flaws! At least he had proven he could be successful too, and he had great pride in his company and was genuinly saddened by its loss.

Steve203 - was thinking about your comments regarding your family's experience with low cars, wanted to say I wholeheartedly agree... for lots of buyers, cars became too low by the early 60s. Personally I prefer a taller car. You mentioned Honda and VW. I have owned both, my '95 Civic 3-door hatch being very low like a sports car while my '87 Golf, '84 Jetta and '92 Audi 100 were nice and tall. Now I drive an SRX, appreciating the interior space despite it being too tall, dumpy looking and clumsy on the road for my tastes. I wish BMW hadn't made the 5-Series GT so ugly aft of its B-pillar, the vehicle height is comfortable and very similar to the '51 Packard. This said, in 1955 the game was about lowness. As Steve said earlier, people had never experienced a super low car and the OEMs had been teasing for several years. The market was primed and ready to indulge itself for a few decades.

I have a question too... how did Packard, the master engine builder, come to launch a flawed engine? They had been planning it since before Nance arrived in May, '52.

I have read the comment from time to time, dating back to the 60s: "why is it, your Aunt Sophie can find more design flaws in a car in 6 months than all the company's engineers with their proving grounds and test stands can in 3 years?"

I think it was the Ward book that says something to the effect "contrary to popular belief, Packard actually did run a test engine before putting the V8 into production" Apparently, they had run a total of 7 prototype engines, only a couple of which were actually close to the design produced.

Why didn't the weakness of the Twin Ultramatic show up in all their hole shots, sand pits and steep grades at PPG? Why didn't they stuff TUs in some older cars and flog them around Detroit traffic?

Then there was apparently an issue with the electrical connections for the TL being exposed to weather on the 55s.

I figured out years ago, that, when a company is in trouble, the first things to be sacrificed are quality control and customer service. Packard's testing budget was probably cut severely in late 53-54, just as they were pushing to bring the new powertrain and suspension to production.

Studebaker had it's cost cutting blow up in it's face too. They tried to reduce the number of dies used to form a stamping from the usual 6 to only 4, resulting in a lot of unusable torn and wrinkled stampings. Why did they have the horrendous FUBAR with the 53 Starliner's front fenders? Studebaker "saved money" by not setting up a pilot line to try out the tooling, before going to full production.

Wonder if it was also a case of the engineers not being given clear direction early enough on what size the engine needed to be. This is pure speculation on my part but I offer it because Packard explored a Utica-built OHV V12 in mid-'53. Given Packard's many quality problems, a steady hand like Frasier, which Steve has suggested, or perhaps Barit could have been a great asset to Nance. Someone to tell him to slow down, be careful, follow the process.

Was reading the 1982 Crestline book on Hudson recently, much mention made of Mason trying to bring the Independents together. The author was a designer at Nash in these years, said Mason had Meade, the chief of engineering which included design, put a small covert team together, worked nights, came up with sharing strategy that would have included 3 basic bodies and varying lengths for Nash Rambler, Studebaker Champion and Commander, Nash Statesman and Ambassador, Hudson Wasp and Hornet, and Packard Clipper and Patrician. The info was used by Mason, Barit and Nance to assess viability of a '57 line-up, which they thought would be reasonable timing once all the companies had been brought together.

Author said Barit approached Mason in June '53 and they mapped out a merger strategy over lunch, but Barit didn't fully commit until many months later when it was clear the '54 freshening wouldn't save Hudson. Author also said Meade told him Nance bowed out of the merger scheme in early '54 in large part because Mason and not he would be top dog.

Came across an image in the Crestline book that showed a custom built by Alexander Bros. Was able to find a link that shows the car. Story reads: "A 1954 Hudson that was customized in October of 1953. The car was built for a major Hudson stockholder who was dismayed in Hudson's 1954 offerings, and wanted to give his "two cents" worth of advice."

Images give a hint of what lowness could have done to the step-down.

http://public.fotki.com/Rikster/11_car_photos/customcars_i_like/hudson_custom_cars/1954-hudson-hard-top/

When you have a stockholder of the day building a low car approaching what we have been suggesting, you know opportunity had been left on the table.

EDIT: Another link with more info. 6.5 inches taken off in total. Seems a bit much but if true, puts height at around 55.5 inches unloaded, 54 inches loaded.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/1954-hudson-hollywood.309293/

A lot of cars had quality problems in the fifties, not just Packard. Chrysler and Studebaker had problems with rapid valve train wear on their first OHV V8s. Others had problems with their auto transmissions, not necessarily big problems but expensive to fix. Then there was corrosion of bodywork and chrome work, squeaks, rattles, frequent failure of power accessories, inadequate air conditioning systems, lumpy out of round tires. Read the Mail For McCahill columns in Mechanix Illustrated, you will see his readers airing new complaints every month.

Lee Iacocca in his autobiography related how Ford quality reached an all time low in 1957. Then in 1960, set a new record for faulty cars. He wondered how they could ever hope to sell another Ford to a loyal Ford man who bought a doggy 57 then traded it in on a worse 60.

Chrysler launched their 5 year 50000 mile warranty program to combat sales resistance due to making so many bad cars in the late 50s.

GM`s response to similar problems was not to fix them, but to launch an advertizing campaign The GM Mark Of Excellence.

So, Studebaker and Packard were in good company. Other companies polished up their tarnished reputations but for Packard it was too late.

A Ford test driver related how he smashed the back window on a prototype convertible by forgetting to lower the window before lowering the top. This was the first model with a glass back window instead of plastic.

He thought he was going to catch hell but his boss said, that is exactly the kind of thing we do testing to find out.

I think on the production models they had a warning light or interlock to prevent this from happening.

The point is an ordinary driver will do things a trained test driver or engineer would never think of.

Well, the old saying is good product covers up a lot of sins. Maybe this is one reason Ford and Chrysler survived their snaffoos. If Packard really wasn't much worse than industry average in '55 then even if their cars had been perfect and the plant had been able to produce from the get go, sales would not have been a whole lot more than what they got, which means they were doomed with the '55 product strategy that Nance chose. But it does sound like they maybe reached a tipping in the market's mind in '55, a few too many quality problems?

That rogue '54 Hudson chop brings to mind a similar flogging of CEO and his product planning underlings... Darrin and his chopped '38 Packard parked in front of the plant at their national dealers meeting. Some of those '54 Hudson images were apparently taken at the Jefferson plant with Hudson officials looking on. The car's owner, Paul duCharme deserves to be inducted in the automotive hall of fame. After his Hudson visit maybe he should have driven 10 minutes down the road to EGB and had someone tell Nance to look out the window, see what he could be getting in on before Barit signs the papers with Mason.

Where in the world did the "designer" of that Hudson chop get the idea for the fender surfacing around the headlights? The '55 Merc and Packard were still a year away. Was it the Panther? If the Hudson body work was done in late '53, might have been before the Panther reveal. Did this stockholder have an in with the Detroit design community? Interesting.

Might have found the answer... '53 concept cars such as this:

http://www.carstyling.ru/de/car/1953_lincoln_xl_500/

and maybe this:

http://www.carstyling.ru/en/car/1953_ford_x_100/

"Well, the old saying is good product covers up a lot of sins."

But they weren't good products. They were bad products. That is the point. The fifties was a time when sales and production was at an all time high, and all cars were bringing out new models, new engines, transmissions, power accessories etc all the time. They had a high percentage of lemons, not just Studebaker and Packard but everybody.

I don't blame the 55 and 56 models for Packard's problems, by that time they were paying for mistakes that were made years earlier.

It was no longer possible to survive on sales of 50,000 to 100,000 units a year even of expensive cars. Maybe if they had stepped up production to 200,000 a year as they planned in the late 40s, and came out with products the public wanted to buy in such numbers, they would have had the financial resources to survive the blows they took between 1953 and 56. Or with better planning, avoided some of the blows.

You can't run a business by setting your production level and then wondering if you can sell them, at least not for very long, so I don't see Packard increasing capacity beyond demand as a good idea.
The 46 was quite competitive, but as discussed in a time of sold out production it didn't make sense to sell less profitable cars. The 6 should not have survived the war. The 22nd series came out in 47, and is again quite contemporary. I think things start unravelling in 50 - 51. As another poster said, there was a big push for "new". The 51, while I think lacking distinction, is also contemporary, but should have been the 50. Then the V8 in 53.