Re: Ok, I'm calling your bluff. Show me how Packards were "better".

Posted by su8overdrive On 2012/7/4 1:36:49

In answer to your thoughtful question, because Packard was in the '40s run by ex-GM production men, not by us wise buffs with the advantage of 70+ years hindsight.

Remember, Alvan Macauley left the Company in 1948.
I'm sure his son Ed was a nice guy to go duck hunting with, have a drink with at the Detroit Athletic Club, and played an enthusiastic jazz trombone, but it takes more than that to run a world-class company, which Packard no longer was by then.

Packard refined the R-R Merlin, but it was still a R-R design. Despite Ford in Dearborn earlier declining the Merlin contract, saying it was too complex to produce in the numbers our Allies needed, R-R, and all English subcontractors, including Ford of England, produced quintuple Packard's wartime Merlin total of 55,523, up to and including the beefier transport versions in the early '50s, which, along with the Packard versions, are the ones the idiot Reno Unlimited Air Race cowboys want.

Off the subject, but i know an internationally renowned Merlin rebuilder who today turns down Reno Air Race business, because he got sick of seeing yahoos with more money than brains blow up those fine engines for an effing trophy.

So, those ex-GMers Packard began recruiting in 1933 to teach them how to build the fine One Twenty eventually left the wrung out whore Packard had become to ex-Hotpoint pushbutton kitchen Jim Nance, who produced naught but the facelifted '51 and a much too late V-8 with a revamped Ultramatic never attuned to a V-8's torque curve,

with a pushbutton transmission.

The irony is that Packard had throughout the 1940s, the industry's finest manufacturing machine shop, not just domestically, but eclipsing Crewe, England, and i'm sure there are some historian machinists here gathered who can share the gory details confirming this.

But...

unlike Rolls-Royce, who increasingly diversified from 1935-on, and GM, an enormous holding company,

Packard did not learn how to deftly market cars.

They surely knew how in the '20s, early '30s. But being
in the '40s an entirely different company,

forgot.

GM and Rolls-Royce were also entirely different companies in the 1940s and '50s, but they remembered.