Packard Forum Index » Post-War (1946-54)

As I stated the other day, I have a 50 Deluxe 2 door sedan. I know of 3 other 49 2 door sedans of which one of them is my parts car. A buddy of mine has his up and running and other than paint, it runs well. We also have a guy advertise on Craig's List who had a 48 2 door sedan partially finished. Does anyone have any idea how many 2 doors Deluxe club 2 doors were made. I have been told it's a rare car but have failed to find any numbers. Did Packard keep any records that are somewhat accurate?

Packard did not keep production records by body style in those years except for a very few styles like limousines, convertibles, etc. But they can be estimated from a study of the sequence portion of the vehicle number. PAC's 48-50 Roster Keeper just made an estimate of the 22nd series production in his latest article in their publication. In the 22nd series Eight, he estimates club sedans at 1693 as 1948 models and 1839 as 1949 (22nd series) models. Super Eight club sedans were estimated as 1309 and 482, and Custom 8 club sedans as 547 and 278, respectively.

If you really have an interest in the 48-50 cars and you don't have that publication (Spring 2011) perhaps you should buy a copy. I assume that when all this data is finally published in Robert Neal's book later this year, there will also be data on the 23rd series.

PS - highes number 23rd series Eight club sedan I've personally examined is #5893, meaning at least 3893 were made in the 23rd series, titled as a mixture of 49 and 50 models as the sequence #s continued on uninterupted between those titled as 49 (23rd series) and 1950 models. Based on the thief-proof # of 2365-5-5893, it was built reasonably late in the 23rd series production.

Someone will correct me if I goof but other than convertibles, believe the only Packard production numbers are by chassis.

For example, in Dawes book Packard, 1942-1962https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/BookShelf/ , 23rd series is listed with Standard Eight & Deluxe Eight together with a total of 49,290 in 49 and 40,359 in 50,
Super & Super 8 Deluxe have a bit of a breakdown 8565 and 4722 various models and adding limos (4) and converts roughly 600 each year and Custom 8 broken down by converts (less than 100) each year and sedans-(around 800) each year.

O_D, I have been under the impression that Packard kept extremely detailed records of their production and that a lot of the records were simply destroyed by Curtiss-Wright when they came in 1956. The same thing was supposed to have happened with saved spare parts inventory that was allegedly dumped into the Detroit River.

A couple of years ago I wrote article for the Geneseo Air Show program on Curtiss-Wright and the P-40. Curtiss-Wright was owned by a holding company called North American Aviation, which in turn was owned by General Motors who also purchased Allison around 1934-35. Give me a day or so to find the file and/or program and I can either post the paragraphs regarding GM's controlling interests if anyone else is interested or send it to you if you are interested.

Also curious was the timing of all of this while Allison was assigned the J33 jet engine v. GE Packard J49 cancellation by Mistah Wilson.

O_D, I have been under the impression that Packard kept extremely detailed records of their production and that a lot of the records were simply destroyed by Curtiss-Wright when they came in 1956

None of their published production tallies in the years I'm familiar with (late 20s forward) had much of anything of totals other than by chassis, as HH has said, with very few exceptions. I believe it was 1951 when they began tallying and publishing totals by chassis AND body style. The data we do have, from books such as Dawes, Turnquist, and AQ (Kimes) are all from factory records.

Perhaps they kept such data, raw or perhaps tablulated, but never published it. Perhaps it was destroyed by C-W. Estimating by highest known production sequence number is the approach most historians have taken. If all the individual Vehicle Unit Record Cards had survived in one place, totals could be derived from them. But at best it seems there are only a couple of hundred of them remaining, in private hands obtained from old dealer files (each dealer received a copy of that record for each car delivered to him, no doubt a master file was kept in Detroit).

After nearly a half-century of delving into this stuff, that's the story, as I know it.