Re: SP merger

Posted by Mahoning63 On 2015/3/7 14:11:35

Re: Hudson and enough time...

It would have meant some long hours but yeah, they might have pulled it off. When OEMs say they need x number of years to develop a vehicle they often include the upfront market planning, architecture and facility studies. Packard and Hudson would have been past that point. Hudson knew their body architecture cold, having developed one for '48 and another for '53. They knew the assembly process cold. Everything was up and running.

On the design end, Packard had in the Panther a vision for what was to come. The fact that it would have been ahead of the competition should have been looked at by the leadership team as a good thing. Besides the beltline dropping, which Panther had, Steve has mentioned in past posts that any use of a Hudson unibody in the mid-50s would have required abandoning the heavy greenhouse pillars of old. I agree. That would have been the main challenge, creating what was effectivly a '57 Cadillac but on a unibody. Maybe the B-pillar had to stay. Fine, but it didn't have to look like a tree trunk.

The lead times we are really talking about were completion of clay surfacing, then tooling and pre-production builds, with testing happening all throughout. The company would have had about 14 months to do this, which I think that would have been enough time for that period. Look at how late Packard started the actual '55s, or the '51s. "All Overtime Approved - JJN" would have been the only ink stamp needed.