Re: Comparing Packards

Posted by su8overdrive On 2023/3/13 1:05:17
As always, HH56 accurately sums it. The Clipper's lowered floorpan left no room for Safe-T-Flex's long torque arms, same reason the 1956-on Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud/Bentley S-series also went to a GM-type i.f.s., despite previous Crewe products using a nut for bolt copy of Safe-T-Flex, as did, at the rear, the postwar Lagonda.

The traditional, old-bodied Packards did have a fifth rear shock to control lateral side sway, while the Clipper version the Monroe horizontal bar and shock are one and the same.

The traditional bodied Packards, like yours, have better ergonomics, IMHO, but streamlining was everything in the industry, and men suffer for fashion as much as the distaff.

Ironically, the Clipper, Packard's last ever hit with the public--not one-marque-itis buffs half a century and more later -- was harbinger of the end, since the Company outsourced bodies to Briggs. Of course, R-R/Bentley offered downmarket, assembled product after the war with bodies provided by Pressed Steel of Cowley near Oxford, who also supplied much of the Sceptered Isle motor industry, even as Briggs bodied Chryslers and Fords.

However, Crewe, despite disassembling a new Buick Limited annually in the years just before War II to glean the latest Detroit production tips, was not being run by former GM production men, and remembered how to market upscale.

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