Re: A drawing - What If Packard had Survived?

Posted by Mahoning63 On 2012/10/7 20:48:19

SU8 - take a look at the image I just posted on the Continuing Packard thread. It's one take on the Bentley Continental that you feel Packard should have made. I agree that the stuff that Bayliff et al has done is crap. Low grade dog food. But I do think it is of value - for those of us who like to pursue such efforts - to digitally stick a vertical grill on a 50s Packard and see what it would look like. Why? Because some of us work in the auto industry and are trying to solve today's problems. And the reason we've seen the Big 3 in or near bankruptcy is because the leadership had, amongst other things, absolutely no clue of automotive history and the lessons that could be learned. It is of value today for an auto person to know what Packard could have done back in Fifties or Forties or Thirties. Fixing Packard is good practice for fixing today's problems. It teaches one to peek around the corner into the future.

I don't buy the bull that most auto historians have recorded as "fact" about Packard's or any other car company's history and the "inevitable" causal factors that did them in. These same people will probably soon write about how it was inevitable that the Big 3 almost lost it in 2009 because of labor or China or the big bad Government or you name it. I sat in the planning mtgs of one of them and with a few others implored the leadership to innovate. They refused. They were incapable. They were the problem. Were it my company the first think i would ask a planner wanna-be is give me, on the spot, a 10 minute dissertation on why Packard went belly up. If they couldn't say something intelligent, something knowledgeable, perhaps something new, I would tell them to go back to their cubicle, bone up on history and in the mean time try not to harm the company too much.

Macauley was no saint and Christopher was no devil. Torsion was a great advance that could have helped differentiate Packard from Cadillac had the fight continued into 1957, Teague was a genius in some areas and awful in others, Packard's wheels started coming off not in the 50s or 40s but 30s because they became tone deaf on styling and pizzaz, which rich people did turn out to want.