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I wonder whether anyone has studied that agreement and those events, be a good book I imagine.

Those events are studied fairly well in James Ward's book The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company. You should find a short review of the book in the Packard Bookshelf. It's a good read and a book worth having.

G'day John,
to PackardInfo. There are a fair few Aussie members on board here but I dare say that I'm the most active among them!

Sold a copy of James Ward's book The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company at the swap meet run in conjunction with this years Packard National Rally for AU$25.00 and saw one recently on Aussie eBay for AU$50.00.

The 14th Packard National Rally in 2010 is being held on Kangaroo Island just after that years Bay to Birdwood Run which will be attended by the Packards taking part in the National Rally. See you there!

Thanks Mate (smile)!!! I got in touch with Rob Trembath and he's going to keep me in the loop, and maybe I can come on the Packard KI run as the Studebaker is a S-P product, in anycase apart from my new Ford Focus Turbodiesel it's all I have.

Cheers

John

John, as a native of Utica, NY, (and not have read the referenced book), can you inform me as to what plant you are referring to in Utica?

Was plant in NY or was it the Utica, MI plant where V8 and Ultra production was? Believe they also did defense work there.

Utica, MI

Owen is correct, Curtiss-wright seem to me to have picked the eyes out of SP and dumped them to thier fate.

3 reasons have been given for Packard's failure:
1) They let Clare Briggs talk them into ending their own body production in favour of Briggs (was OK until he died and his family sold the business to Chrysler to meet inheritance taxes, needless to say Chrysler didn't want to make bodies for a competitor);
2) The damage to their production equipment which was stored during the war took a while to repair, giving other manufacturers a head start);
3) Most important of all at the time was their difficulty obtaining supplies of steel, GM and Ford, probably Chrysler too had connections (or owned) in the steel-making industry and smaller companies like Packard had to wait.

Regardless, we can be proud of our vehicles, after all who else can claim to have once been the best car in the world?