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Mahoning63 wrote:
the '56 Golden Hawk did in fact sell in higher volumes than the '56 Sky Hawk despite its higher price, suggesting that the Packard engine in the Hawk was a winning combo in the public's eye.
just to be clear on what you are suggesting, were the engines that you say "existed" a part of the service pool that OEMs are required to provide for 20 yrs, or were these additional units? If additional, how many are we talking about?
Onward to the '57 woulda-coulda's. If our goal is to explore how the Packard flame might have been kept burning, and if raiding all or part of the service stock was an option (I don't think this was was until years later when Studebaker went out of business), I say let's let it rip and really mine this.
Thanks for the info on the '56 Golden Hawk. It does give some background figures that tend to at least back up the original idea of this thread. Second, I can't be very clear on the existing engine supply except for the anecdotal evidence that there seemed to be quite a bit of "overrun" at the Utica plant. This makes sense, because if there was going to be an all-out effort for the '57 Packard model, they would've needed to keep producing engines as if this were going to happen. Not an outlandish ideal, considering "Black Bess" was in existence and there was no reason to think otherwise... or any reason to let production know otherwise, more to the point. Now, Utica was going away, which wasn't at all foreseen (Utica was specifically chosen to produce the new Packard V8) but exactly when it was known that it would be shut it down, I don't know.
BUT parts definitely existed to back up the Packard engines for many years. Hell, in the 1960s, you could get practically anything from SASCO catalogs, which were still being printed from South Bend then. In '57 and '58, it wouldn't have been a stretch at all to put the V8's back into production, except stretching the wallets of S-P, which was basically becoming just "S".
SO, I would hypothesize that a lack of corporate will and gumption caused Studebaker to retreat from the Packard brand, circle the wagons, and go into the Compact Car market. Sure, the compact was coming into its own in the late 50's, but c'mon, look at what was built by Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Ford/Mercury/Lincoln throughout the late '60s and early '70s. Even Chrysler, which seemed to lean toward the compacts by the early '60s, jumped back into the land yachts with both feet over this period.
What Packard and Studebaker had together was a pretty good marriage of good cars with a reputation in the low-priced, compact field with Studebaker, and great legacy cars that would fit the mid to large size/price and prestige field with Packard. It really could've worked if it hadn't been for the short-sighted timidity that seemed to rule the S-(P) boardrooms in the late 50s IMO.
Even if there had been no feasible way to go forward with Packard, I still believe that there could've been a Packard "swan song" that was much more worthy of the name than the Studebaker-engined morphodites of '57 and '58. Not that I hate those cars, but I wish they would've been better, designed and powered to the standards that would've evoked a legacy, rather than an awkward footnote at the end of Packard's storied history.
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