Re: Post war production numbers

Posted by Owen_Dyneto On 2011/3/29 22:30:50

O_D, I have been under the impression that Packard kept extremely detailed records of their production and that a lot of the records were simply destroyed by Curtiss-Wright when they came in 1956

None of their published production tallies in the years I'm familiar with (late 20s forward) had much of anything of totals other than by chassis, as HH has said, with very few exceptions. I believe it was 1951 when they began tallying and publishing totals by chassis AND body style. The data we do have, from books such as Dawes, Turnquist, and AQ (Kimes) are all from factory records.

Perhaps they kept such data, raw or perhaps tablulated, but never published it. Perhaps it was destroyed by C-W. Estimating by highest known production sequence number is the approach most historians have taken. If all the individual Vehicle Unit Record Cards had survived in one place, totals could be derived from them. But at best it seems there are only a couple of hundred of them remaining, in private hands obtained from old dealer files (each dealer received a copy of that record for each car delivered to him, no doubt a master file was kept in Detroit).

After nearly a half-century of delving into this stuff, that's the story, as I know it.