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To me it was a much bigger mistake to let the senior models slide. I understand in the post war period Packard's attitude was that the profits were in the lower price models and the senior stuff was just a nuisance that they wished would go away.

From 51 on they had a Patrician or 400 4 door sedan and a Caribbean convertible, period.If you didn't happen to like those models you were out of luck.

Everything else was on the smaller Clipper wheelbase and body except the Cavalier or 300 which was selling against Buick.

It is very well possible to build a smaller car which is on top in its class.

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To get back to the original question - if we want to be brutal about it the one thing that most contributed to the demise of Packard was lack of money, meaning lack of sales.

Packard's sales figures for the period 1946 - 58

1946 - 29293

1947 - 51086

1948 - 141490

1949 - 59290

1950 - 46750

1951 - 100312

1952 - 62601

1953 - 84740

1954 - 30631

1955 - 55517

1956 - 28845

1957 - 4809

1958 - 2622

Rusty, thanks for compiling the list. I think, lack of sales is a result, which has reasons. When looking at your and Peter's list, then the management comes into the spotlight.

When you look at the above figures certain things leap out at you.

- Packard started off strongly in the post war period. They got off to a good start in the reconversion year of 1946 then hit their stride with the 1947s

- The 1948 restyle of the prewar Clipper body was well received with sales more than double the previous year.

- 1949 and 1950 were not so stellar. This was typical of the times. You had to have a new style to catch the public eye. Sales would drop off from a third to a half in the second year, no matter how good the car.

- 1951 with an all new car, and high sales again, although not as good as 1948. I suspect this was because the new Packard looked too much like the 1948 Cadillac and Futuramic Oldsmobile. In other words the style was up to date but broke no new ground, it was good enough but not exciting enough to make buyers break out their cheque books. By this time Cadillac, Olds, and Chrysler all had new OHV V8s, all selling against Packard.

- Subsequent years sales were less as might be expected. 1953 surprisingly good, but look at 1954. The now 4 year old body and lack of a V8 are telling.

- 1955 sales with the new V8 and restyled body almost double 1954 but still much lower than 1948 and 1951. In fact the trend is to lower highs and lower lows all along. 1948 was the peak of sales, after that Packard slowly lost ground. 1953 was the last decent year for sales.

- 1956 down again. By this time they must be deep in the red. Last year for real Packards

- 1957 and 58, the Packardbaker years. A rear guard action selling dressed up Studebakers. Sales so low they probably did not recoup the trivial tooling expense of turning Studebakers into Packards.

When I look at these figures it seems the real turning point was the 1948 - 51 period. This is the last time they had any real financial strength. This is when they were planning and developing the cars they were to build from 1951 on.

If they had not stuck with the 51 body so long, if they had restyled it more comprehensively in 52 and 53 then had an all new car in 54, if they had an OHV V8 4 years sooner things might have been different.

As it is they rested on their laurels too long and did not move with the times. For a while they got away with it, there were enough loyal Packard customers to keep them going, but they did not realize the general public saw them and their cars as out of date and obsolete.

When they finally pulled their finger out and gave the car buying public something really new and sensational it was too late. Nobody was interested.

And by that time they had dissipated their capital to the point that everything depended on that one roll of the dice. When it came up snake eyes they were through.

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Dilution of brand. The 110 and 120 saved Packard. They did not kill it. If they had, Packard would have gone out of business in 1940. They dropped the 110 and 120 when they introduced the Clipper in 1941 and they stopped building 6 cylinder cars in 1947. From 1948 on there was no vestige of the 110 or 120 left. 1948 was the best sales year Packard had in the postwar period. To say people refused to buy Packards in 1956, because of a model they built 20 years earlier is absurd. They did not buy Packards in 1956 because they did not want 1956 Packards, it had nothing to do with 1936 Packards.

Non forthcoming defence contracts. This is a valid point but it is worse than you think. Packard was a leading supplier of aircraft engines, boat engines and other military gear until their contracts were cancelled in the mid fifties. This was the doing of "engine Charlie" Wilson, ex General Motors executive, now Secretary of Defense, and his "narrow based procurement policy" which basically meant buying everything from General Motors.

This left Packard holding the bag after spending $17 million on a new jet engine factory.

Brand stagnation. Packard never chased Chev or Ford. After 1947 they made large, eight cylinder cars exclusively. The only other brands with this policy were Cadillac, Buick, Lincoln, and Mercury. These were all medium priced and high priced brands. Such well thought of cars as Chrysler, DeSoto, Oldsmobile and Studebaker made mainly six cylinder cars. Packard did not.

An inability to revert to 50000 PA luxury cars. Here you put your finger on it. For various reasons to do with mass production it was impossible to make such a small number of cars, sell them at a profit, and have enough left over to develop a new model. In the post war period the progress in design was tremendous. New OHV V8 engines, auto trans, power steering, power brakes, all kinds of power accessories. Air conditioning, new braking and suspension systems. New body styles every year, at least a major face lift, and an all new design every 2 or 3 years. Packard made a valiant effort to keep up but in the end, fell behind.

This is why it drives me crazy when people blame Packard's demise on building cheap cars. For one thing they never built cheap cars. For another their only salvation was to mass produce cars in sufficient numbers to make a profit. The days of hand built cars with custom built one off bodies were long gone. Cars of the highest reputation like Pierce Arrow, Stutz and Peerless went bankrupt in the depression trying to follow this policy. It is sheer madness to think it possible after 1930, to stay in business with anything but a mass produced car.

Even 50,000 sales per year were not enough to pay for the new tooling needed every year to keep up to date.

I believe it would have been possible for them to sell 100,000 to 200,000 cars per year. In fact they sold over 100,000 cars in 1948 and again in 1951. If they had moved with the times and gotten their V8 engine out a few years sooner, and if they had more up to date body styles they could have sold 100,000 per year or more every year.

The fifties were really the heyday of the medium priced and high priced car. For the first time since the depression people had money to spend. They no longer were willing to settle for the cheapest plain sedan. They wanted chrome, 2 tone paint, V8 engines and all the modern conveniences.

In 1953 Plymouth introduced a new, more practical, more sensible car that was smaller than the model it replaced. Sales went to hell. Buick actually outsold Plymouth that year even though Buick was a much more expensive car.

It was the same everywhere. The new hardtop convertibles were a sensation, and everywhere it seemed car buyers wanted the latest, longest, lowest, flashiest car they could get.

Packard should have been right on top of this market but they let it slip through their fingers.

I would have to blame the collective Packard Board for a large part of running Packard into the ground. They should have secured controlling interest in a steel plant so they wouldn't have been forced into spot market purchasing for production. Should have been done before WWII. Did they make an attempt at Briggs when it was put up for sale? A body builder would have been my second priority. Steel first.

I am sometimes given to conspiracy theories. Secretary of Defense and former General Motors' Charlie Wilson cancelling Packard's J-47 jet engine contract and the subsequent hiring of Nance to run Packard as a corporate fifth column action to destroy the company. Nance started at GM and ends up at the Hotpoint appliance subsidiary of GE, J-47 jet engine designer and competing engine builder, and then takes over direction of an auto manufacturer? Nance, who then negotiates a disastrous merger with a financial iceberg? I can't seem to find any indication of due diligence by the Packard board in search for CEO or merger with Studebaker. Wilson and GM's history of conspiracy to destroy the Inter-urban traction companies to sell GM buses in the late forties along with eliminating Packard as a competitive source of defense procurement seems to me to be more than coincidence. Curtiss-Wright was part of North American Aviation, which had been originally set up as a GM aviation holding company. And GM owned Allison. Again, I think it too much to be coincidence.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that Cadillac is selling far fewer units now than in the 50's. And that includes all those kooky pickup trucks and suburban wagon things. Forget about Lincoln too. At one time Lincoln was operating the most profitable per unit line of cars in the world. Both of those lines don't serve a purpose anymore.

Heck, Packard sold more cars in 1955 than Cadillac did in 2012.

Who said Christopher didn't want to sell more Customs? That's a bunch of bunk, keeps getting regurgitated, originally came from some of the Christopher-hating historians. Of course he wanted to sell more. The fact is that he couldn't, the supply met the demand. The cars weren't good enough to compete with Cadillac. The Seniors hadn't been good enough since 1937 or earlier and never did reach Cadillac, not even in '55 and '56. There's a lot more to a top tier car than torsion level and a V8.

Packard made a measly $3M on over 100,000 sales in 1937. Yes, money was spent on the tooling for the '38s and new UAW costs but the fact is, the 110 cannibalized the 120. The only unknown was the extent to which it did but for sure it wasn't a minor amount. The 110 lived on in the '42 Clipper six and eight base models and all Packard base models into the mid-50s. The early 50s 200 base car didn't even have full carpet. Macaulley thinking ran amok for two decades.

Profit for the Bimmer 7 negative? Hey, the sales stink. M-B always outsells it. I remember hearing from an old auto guy that if an OEM only has 25% unprofitable product in any given year they are doing pretty good. These days every showroom has its share of dogs.

I do agree the Seniors weren't, at some point, fully competitive with Cadillac. From Macaulley on down, Packards's CEOs never figured out how to spec out a proper Senior after 1939.