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Quote:
Rusty, the contrasting juxaposition creates certain doubt but could be a simple misunderstanding. According to Toyota the first export of a Japanese passenger car to the U.S. has been a "Crown".




CNN says, it was in 1957. Before the merger a Packard has never seen a Japanese car on an U.S. road.
It is a matter of taste to call the Toyota "better".


The Gullwing and Sophia Loren (picture source: www.jakescarworld.blogspot.de).

But "smaller modells" exported to the U.S. from Mercedes or BMW, comparable to this sweet little Toyota? But again, it could be a misunderstanding.

Mercedes 300 (picture source: Mercedes Benz)


BMW 501 (picture source: Bundesarchiv)

By the 50's Cadillac was outselling Studebaker so Packard was in the dust.

The Twin-Six put Packard on top of the world, but it lasted only 8 years before it was replaced by the straight 8. The first straight 8 was kept for twice as long, and the second twice as long again.

Packard loved the fatter profits from this strategy, but the 29 crash killed the market. After that Packard didn't have the money to support the R&D to stay on top of the world. This was also reflected in their advertising which pretty much admitted that people drove Packards because they thought there were supposed to. The same way as going to church.

Given this situation Packard did pretty darn well.

I encourage all who are interested in this topic to read Robert Neal's article (History As It Should Have Been - Packard's Alternate History -- 1946 to 1956) in the most recent issue of The Packard Cormorant (same issue as Czirr's article). Perhaps the most comprehensive and well written what if about what could have been.

(o{}o)

Tim, a friend of mine used to say "Packard built cars for Methodists who subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, then the world stopped making those kind of people"

When Packard was building the Twin-Six they owned the luxury market. But they dropped it because higher profits and better performance could be had from the straight 8 which, at the time, was the up and coming motor design.

That opened a huge hole in the prestige market and soon they were facing Duesenbergs and Cadillac V-16s. The Caddy 12 sold over 10,000 units which is stealing a lot of sales from Packard.

So they really fell behind in the 20's, because they had nothing on the drawing board. The Custom 8 was a better car than the competition but by 1930 had reached its final development. Downdraft carburetion kept it going, but Packard didn't have the money to spend on a car that would set a new standard the way the Twin-Six did.

Agreed Guscha, Packard was lost in space by '56.

Packard up to 1923 shared the luxury market with the other two P's... Pierce and Peerless. It was only when Packard came up with the one-two punch of Six and Eight in 1924 that they broke out of the pack and became the King of Luxury. Duesy was never a challenge, not with its ridiculous prices and fewer than 500 cars sold over several years. The Sixteen... big flash in the pan followed by big fizzle. Packard probably could have skipped the Twelve and done just fine with the Super Eight leading the charge. They wouldn't have had bragging rights but so what, the only bragging rights that counted were market share and profits.

Packard had oodles of R&D money in the early Thirties. They used it first on the low-slung FWD V12 car but that didn't pan out. Their next big R&D effort was the One Twenty, which did pan out. That they didn't immediately leverage it and its new assembly line to make a new line of flagships was an Alvan Macauley blunder, plain and simple. The 110 was also his mistake. And he was two years late with IFS for the Seniors and four years late with split windshields for all the cars. And finally, he got tagged directly in the nose by Cadillac's 60S. Packard's ascendancy to the top of the luxury market was due to Alvan. So was Packard's initial descent.

Paul, many good points. The late takeover of split windshields and other market trends were probably covered with attributes like "perseverance", "grit" and "keeping conservative principles".

When I was a kid, old timers were still talking about the amazing Packard Twin Six that would do over 70 mph out of the showroom.

I never heard them talk about the "amazing Peerless".

Mind you, these were not old car people. These were people on the bus or the train or the front porch. People who didn't give a hoot about Packard except that it was once the top of the world.

Tim - Packard shared the top of the world until 1924. The sales numbers and constant reference to "3 Ps" are the hard evidence. Pierce folks loved their cars too... am sure they talked them up just as much. Packard didn't make its big move until it morphed its Six into the Eight and undercut Pierce's Dual Valve Six by thousands of dollars. The Eight was perceived to be the more powerful because of its longer hood and two extra cylinders even though the Pierce engine actually made more horsepower. That was Alvan's genius. He made life miserable for every competitor including Cadillac. 10 years later his strategic creativity ran out of gas.

I disagree, when they were new the Custom 8 was a very good performer. Once the Lansky gang (of Murder Inc fame) used a stolen Custom 8 in a job and tore up 6th Avenue in New York at 80 mph. That's pretty fast for 1927. The new 8 did out run the old Twin Six.