Packard Forum Index » Pre-War (1899-1942)

Thanks, Garrett. I like the line about being appointed Capitan of the Titanic just before it sinks. It is a good analogy to Nance and his time at Packard. The company was already doomed.

A con like the 1953 "two great lines of cars" campaign only works if people want to be conned. Anybody could see the cars were the same.

Marketing is like politics. Speeches containing substance is the surest road to defeat. So they sell crap, empty, slonganeering. Bottled water is a great example. Most of the stuff comes out of the tap. It says it right on the package, so except if you live in a place like Flint where the tap water is poison you are throwing money away.

Truer words never said. An eight-year-old could see they were the same car.

Unaware of what Nance did, or any of those heading Packard after Alvin Macauley stepped down, perhaps not coincidentally just as the tubs debuted.

Packard's sole postwar accomplishment, other than, essentially, a Dynaflow with lock up torque convertor, was Torsion Level, and that from an outside engineer who had to sell the hell out of it to Packard's hidebound, coupon clipping, asleep at the switch mgmt., only after the Big Three shrugged it off.

Re: the Hemmings "Classic Car" rehash, seems to be a cottage industry repeating Packard postmortems in down home car magazines. Nothing like Special Interest Autos around today.

In the '50s, in general, Cadillac owned the coasts and the hipper wealth between, Chrysler the educated professionals, engineers, architects, professors, Packard the conservative middle America Elmer Fudd set.

And shouldn't this be on the postwar forum?