Re: Packard & Hudson proximity

Posted by Owen_Dyneto On 2013/2/18 14:41:25

I generally avoid these speculations on "what could have been"; not that they're not interesting but rather than they are just endless. But let me add a point to consider that I haven't seen yet mentioned; Hudson was committed to unibody construction when it went to the stepdown style. I'm told that designing and tooling for a new unibody structure is far more expensive than body-on-frame; the costs in introducing the Jet left Hudson without resources to update their body/frame structure which was already long overdue for replacement. If that's true and Hudson and Packard combined, then either Hudson would have to revert to body-on-frame or Packard to unibody to hope to get enough volume to amortize costs over what had become an industry standard of "new" styling every 3 years or so, in either case the costs would no doubt have been far too high to give a chance of recovery of costs. If all of this is true, then Hudson combining with the only other unibody maker at the time, Nash, makes a lot more sense.

Earlier in this thread I think I read that Buick sales without a V8 were good thru 1952. Check me out on this but I believe 1952 was a very poor year for Buick sales, their worst since 1942.