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For those of use who like to speculate on what it would have taken to save our favorite defunct marque, this discussion...

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/07/09/open-diff-how-would-you-have-saved-your-favorite-defunct-automotive-marque/

Thanks for the heads up! Packard was well-discussed; couldn't resist offering thoughts on neglected Pierce-Arrow.

again?

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Amen, Mr. Pushbutton. Yes, enough of this subject.
Endless nerdathon over long dead company from those not alive nor yet sentient enough to appreciate the tenor of the times.

We're better served by focusing on hard facts, unspun history, and tech savvy to keep our survivors running,
letter and spirit of Packard. What was and is.

Where were all these insightful souls while the vast East Grand buildings decayed beyond restoration?

Let's concentrate on what remains.

Thank you, Mr. PB.

With all due respect, must dissent. We just bailed out two American car companies. The third was only 6 mos away from same fate, survived only because it mortgaged everything including its logo to buy enough dollars to stay afloat and because we gave it a $5B "green" loan to convert Michigan Truck to Focus, which was nothing more than bail-out money by a different name.

You may want to talk strictly about keeping Packards on the road, which is laudable. I want more. I want to know how car companies were run, are run and should be run. Ten years from now I just might need the info. The buffoons that run our car companies today definitely need the info today.

I have been participating in these forums for four years now, have listened to the opinions of others on the subject of what Packard did right/wrong and have at times offered my own thoughts. If I had to grade the opinions from four years ago I'd give them a D+, including my own. The same old drivel that a few auto historians kept pushing had permeated the minds of just about everyone. Now things are different, folks are starting to see history anew. I grade everyone a B-, again myself included and we are getting better, thinking better, discerning better and are way beyond the F that the last 30 years worth of CEOs have earned, present company included. Why the heck is the industry still talking about, for example, Lincoln? Why is that problem still not solved? The Boeing pilot flying Ford has thrown just about everything off the plane that he could to maintain altitude - Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Mazda, 50% of the American hourly and salaried workforce - and is down to only two brands, Ford and Lincoln. And he STILL can't figure out what to do. Why? Because he doesn't know squat about how to really run a car company nor do his underlings. HE should participate in these forums. So should Lutz, another arrogant bastard who did great at car design right up to the point when he stunk at it. Would he ever admit this? No. What about Chrysler? I can tell you stories from people associated with them that would make your head spin. More arrogance, more nitwits passing themselves off as car people. And I can point to you a whole cadre of gearheads within these companies who knew no more about how to run them than the pinheads at the top. Their answer to every problem was to throw more cylinders and horsepower at it. Real smart. You want to know why American cars had such poor quality for so many years? I'll let you in a dirty little secret: it was more than just the bean counters. It was the engineers and others. Too often the quality you saw in the cars reflected the quality you saw in their homes.

Sorry for the rant, am sick and tired of the industry blowing it and never knowing why this keeps happening. I guess Packard means different things to different people. For me it's the cars and a whole lot more.

Amen, Paul!

The domestic auto industry is (still) a real train wreck. I don't wanna beat a dead horse, either, but there is a lot to be learned from the past if you take off the rose-colored glasses.

Amen Paul! Others can call it beating a dead horse if they like, it's their prerogative, but much insight is to be gained by analyzing what went both right and wrong then, insights that can now be applied to the current boneheads still running the American industry into the ground (see Lincoln currently circling the drain).

Oddly enough, the more I engage in this analysis, the more I come to appreciate and respect what Packard did by dropping the rose-colored glasses of old and see their actions within the context of the period. As such, I've developed a deeper interest in and respect for all their cars, something not always the case at one time.

Steve

Remember: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. " - George Santayana

For those of us who enjoy looking back and asking "what might have been" you will probably enjoy an article in the next issue of The Packard Cormorant by a well-respected author and professional Packard historian who reverses some key decisions going back into the 30s and compounds their effect going forward. Though I've read many such articles, this one was particularly insightful - watch for it.

I still maintain this position: No company that missed the conglomerations of the teens and twenties was poised to survive due to the change from wood framed bodies to all steel construction.
The tooling, shop and labor costs of building modern all steel bodies became such a large percentage of the selling price of a car that a manufacturer had to be able to amortize that cost over as many units as possible, and being an independent did not set up a manufacturing concern for survival.
Think too of the mindset when companies like Packard and Studebaker (finally) died--there had been an anti-independent bias before the war, the companies that made it through the war were lucky with the post war car shortage, but even then their material allotments were colored by anti-independent bias by controlling forces in the government. "Don't buy one of those, they'll be out of business soon and you won't be able to get parts" that was the water cooler talk of the era, and it was persuasive. Add to that the weakness in the independent dealer network structure, and the inability to control loan rates due to the lack of a credit arm and there you have the seeds of failure.
If the mindset in business,banking and government were the same in 2009 as 1956 we would live today in a world with no GM or Chrysler, and perhaps Ford, if the leverages they applied for loan cash in '09 were not availaible.
Packard missed the big dance in the teens and twenties, and died an old maid who had a desperate marriage late in life.

Mahoning,

[quote]
Mahoning63 wrote:
To often the quality you saw in the cars reflected the quality you saw in their homes.





Take out the word cars and I think you have just best described what has happened to this country since the "engineering" of 1980 elections.

Sorry, don't seem to be able to close quote option.