Re: What SINGLE factor MOST contributed to the demise of Packard?

Posted by Mahoning63 On 2013/5/8 10:46:19

Merger was an option but not the only one and I would argue not the best. It's like saying that Mercedes should have merged with VW in the Fifties. A luxury car company makes a different type of car than a volume maker. Look at Lincoln today, floundering as it tries to work with volume Ford front wheel drive platforms. And every company has a personality. Packard's was completely different than Nash. Combine them and turn them both over to a professional manager and its good bye personality.

Not sure the amortization situation was as dire as most have assumed. Breakeven volumes mattered. Hudson had a breakeven of 70,000. Packard's was around 50,000 in the early Fifties. Both companies showed an ability to make a good profit, they just didn't do it consistently for reasons having nothing to do with their basic business model and everything to do with product. Yes, GM had scale. What did they spend the extra profits on? Cars of course, but also wasteful habits of the type that the old hands at Packard reamed Nance for. He thought he was a fat cat in a fat cat corporation and they tried to tell him "no, this is not how Packard has always been run". GM's spillage every day was more than the daily revenue of many small and medium sized companies. And the Caddy's greenhouse looked like a Buick. Caddy only got away with it because Packard didn't have its own act together enough to fight back. Remember the 80s commercial about the Town Car owner easily finding his car while the Caddyoldsmobuick owners were confused?

On the One Twenty my point was that Packard should have immediately leveraged it like it had the 1921 Six and made a new line of Seniors so it could drop the old line after 1936. Instead they made the 115, a touchdown for the other side if ever there was one. V12s in luxury cars were of value up until high compression OHV V8s arrived, although by the mid-30s they needed to be made cost efficiently and not excessively large. 423 cubes made alongside the 282 would have been just that. And the new Senior hood would have needed to grow loooong. The company never figured out how to make a proper Senior after 1939, the exception being the '41 Sport Brougham although it meant little as an expensive custom. It and cars like it should have been mass produced the day the old Seniors were retired.