Re: SP merger
Posted by Steve203 On 2015/3/22 14:30:55
Quote:
Yup. A luxury brand would be expected to have an older, more conservative clientele. Too low seating, or two low a roof, or difficult egress would alienate them. Remember how Barit insisted the Jet have enough headroom for him to wear a hat in the back seat? Not as big a deal as he thought it was in a compact, like the Jet, but my suspicion is he was right about headroom, when it came to people of his age and wealth.
Packard could have gone either way, unibody or BoF, and gotten the footwells. My mom's 72 Torino was BoF, and had footwells front and back. Where the film you linked to shows the BoF Merc having the body overhanging the frame rails, that was the old way of doing it. Pix of the 55 Packard frame show it was made the same way, with the body supported by outriggers from the frame rails. A few years later, GM went to a narrow X frame, with no outer rails at all. Then GM went to a hybrid with the narrow X frame and perimeter frame rails. What I would propose to accommodate TL and footwells would be a ladder version of the perimeter frame, rather than the X version, with the crossbraces under the seats, with the crossbraces in boxes under the seats to raise them enough to provide clearance below them for the torsion bars.
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Mahoning63 wrote:
Steve203 - your latest comments point out the risk that Packard in particular would have been taking going to step-down and a super low roof height. It wouldn't have been a quesion of whether they would have alienated a certain percentage of their traditional customer base, only the exact number and whether a significantly larger number of non-Packard owners would have moved to Packard-Hudson to offset the loss. Vehicle design is a balancing act.
Yup. A luxury brand would be expected to have an older, more conservative clientele. Too low seating, or two low a roof, or difficult egress would alienate them. Remember how Barit insisted the Jet have enough headroom for him to wear a hat in the back seat? Not as big a deal as he thought it was in a compact, like the Jet, but my suspicion is he was right about headroom, when it came to people of his age and wealth.
Packard could have gone either way, unibody or BoF, and gotten the footwells. My mom's 72 Torino was BoF, and had footwells front and back. Where the film you linked to shows the BoF Merc having the body overhanging the frame rails, that was the old way of doing it. Pix of the 55 Packard frame show it was made the same way, with the body supported by outriggers from the frame rails. A few years later, GM went to a narrow X frame, with no outer rails at all. Then GM went to a hybrid with the narrow X frame and perimeter frame rails. What I would propose to accommodate TL and footwells would be a ladder version of the perimeter frame, rather than the X version, with the crossbraces under the seats, with the crossbraces in boxes under the seats to raise them enough to provide clearance below them for the torsion bars.
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