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....but there is nothing you can do about the Packard windows.

That was true for a lot of years but fortunately (assuming the prewar Packard cylinders are all the same), prewar repro cylinders and valves are again listed as available from Hydro-E-Lectric and maybe others. They have been sporadic though so maybe anyone in need get them while they are listed.

Now if someone would just confirm something modern that could be modified or used as a fix for the prewar pumps instead of needing to have anything individually machined. I expect such low demand means most likely not going to happen.

I recall reading where at least on of the LeBaron Sport Broughams was ordered with manual roll-up windows.

Was at Hickory Corners last weekend for the Pierce annual. The many cars sitting next to each other in the museums allowed for direct comparison. IMHO the proportions and presence of the '40 One Eighty 138" touring sedan didn't hold a candle to the '37 Twelve or any of the other heavy iron. The '41 60 Special looked dazzling but a bit plump/stubby. The '49 60 Special looked more like a properly dimensioned luxury car. The '42-47s Cadillac looked awful - rotund body, stubby hood, weird front fenders, faceless. The late 30s/early 40s goes down as one of the great missed opportunities to make a long flowing and beautiful luxury car save for a few customs. Roadmaster, 62, Clipper and the like were 100% Junior in their dimensions. Cars got a lot bigger again post-war and the full luxury experience returned. True the '61 Continental shrunk but its low height kept it in balance. As Gordon Buerhig said, good design is largely a matter of proportion. This was Packard's forte from 1924-37.

Now I also worked on one of those Lebaron Sport Sedans with the hydraulic windows. I've never heard of any regulators fitting those cars so if I had to choose between the Lebaron and the 41 Sixty Special I'd take the Cadillac. I can always put a 49 OHV engine in the 60 Special, but there is nothing you can do about the Packard windows.

Tangential to the main topic here but as long as the hydraulic windows were brought up, let me add that I know of 1 41 LeBaron Sport Brougham and another 41 180 138"wb sedan where the windows were converted to electric. I don't know any specific details but in the case of the LeBaron the replacement window regulators were taken from Jeep Cherokees and I was lead to believe the conversion was relatively simple. No other info but I could contact the owner if there was interest.

switching to postwar, Jim Nance made a lot of mistakes but he tried very hard to make the 1953 and 1954's world class quality cars. These cars were built with very high build quality. The doors can be closed with a solid thud with a single finger they are so precise. The 53-54 7 passenger sedans and limos brought back the long wheelbase models to the lineup and the 53-54 Caribbeans were simply gorgeous.
The 55's and 56's were fine cars but the Conner plant issue hurt their build quality. A "sorted out" 55/56 is really a fine car. It is sad that Packard management lessened the emphasis on the senior cars after 1934 and took profit as a higher priority. Nance tried all he could to bring back the Senior lines to top realm but it was simply too little too late. The 120 line saved packard but also killed it. They should have called the 120 another name to not water down the Packard name. (Though the 120 was a darn fine car for its price). Cadillac later brought out the Cimarron and Catera and never learned from Packard's mistake of watering down your brandsake.

G'day all, Well, all that I can say is that the Packard ethos of "ask the man who owns one" has cost me around 20 cars and 60 motorbikes. Now, when people ask me if Vincent motorbikes are any good, I can answer them because I have one. I can give a comparative opinion of Rolls-Royce, Daimler, Mercedes, Riley, Ford, General Motors, etc to Packard because I have each Marque, not just a one-off test drive evaluation. I envy the people who have had the experience of many of the by-gone marques.
However, I have always considered that every Marque has a particular strength, be it style, power, endurance, whatever.
I don't mind people coming onto packardinfo.com saying other cars are better, as they may well be in many ways. The fact that they are doing it on packardinfo.co is a Freudian element and we should be pleased that they think enough of Packard to voice an opinion on our site.
I own Packards because I like Packards. Best regards Peter Toet

Lot's had been said that the 110 and 120 were the "mistake that saved the company" and that if Packard just kept building more expensive cars then it would have done great. That is just phewey. At least I'll agree with Turnquist that the company could not survive on caviar alone. A case in point is the 38-40 Cadillac V-16. And Rolls-Royce relied on the Wraith platform after the war.

Today there are all sorts of crazy so called "super cars" floating around that might be used as an argument against Packard going downmarket, but Rolls and Bentley are no longer British companies, that Maybach thing is history, and all that talk of reviving a super priced Cadillac went out with the GM bankruptcy.

I like the post-war Packards better than most other cars, but that isn't saying they are better. Beginning in 1951 the Chrysler V-8 was head and shoulders better than the Packard or the Cadillac even with the quirky ersatz overdrive plus torque converter transmission.

I think the merger idea was good except putting Packard into a hodgepodge of different independents was like a doctor prescribing a rotten marriage as a cure for depression.

Of the independents once Studebaker quit the car business they did alot better. Packard was trying to diversify but after it lost the government work it had a real problem on its hands.

Of course today nobody is doing well. The USA is in secular decline and it is just a matter of time before it will no longer be able to go around being the worlds biggest bully. Ford survived by ripping off its creditors. That doesn't look like a long term plan because who is going to loan them money knowing that the minute they get into trouble they will welch on their obligations?

It is popular to knock people like Nance, but Packard management at least had the integrity to call it quits without burning its creditors. To me that is one reason to like Packards. They didn't use the credit markets to line their own pockets and then welch. They were building good cars, not the best, but at least good cars.

Sportsfans - Once again, Dr. Cole nails it succinctly, every line of his above right as rain. Packard folded without sticking it to the taxpayers, a class act to the end.
Compare with GM suing the US government for War II Allied bombing damage to their German Opel plants;

recently making us taxpayers bail them out, because their out of touch fat cat execs in their Grosse Point monster homes were too busy building dorky SUVs half the size of UPS vans.

Worse, in fact, downright hideous, GM is today just another flag-waving multinational corporation ducking the federal income taxes you and i must shoulder.

Then, these same sorry bozos, flying their corporate jets to the Washington welfare office, whine about "....the unions, (their) high costs-per-unit." BMW, Mercedes, Audi, VW, Porsche ALL have higher unit costs, but that doesn't prevent them from joining Japan, Inc. eating Detroit's lunch.

Meanwhile, Germany today owns fully 70% of all Europe's debt, China much of ours.

Tho' Ford didn't join GM and Chrysler at the welfare trough recently, as Dr. Cole describes, FoMoCo's been another welfare queen long enough. I don't care how many macho voice over pickup truck and Mustang TV commercials Ford makes, nor how strenuously Ford, GM wave the flag.

Remember Samuel Johnson's line from centuries ago: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Chrysler's tank testing left Packard's Proving Grounds a shambles. But Packard never complained, just went back to work. Work. Not receiving welfare while waving the flag.
Packard lost some huge government jet engine contracts merely as one of their executives later wound up in office.
Compare with the revolving door nonsense, waste that occurs in Pentagon contracts today, 48.4 % of every one of our tax dollars going into that unaudited black hole.

We'd be better served today by the buck stops here class acts of the Packard Motor Car Company and the late, great Admiral Hyman Rickover.

Dr. Cole's also right about the 110/120. As mentioned,
Packard's SOLE blunder with those fine, reasonably sized cars-----

the precise wheelbases as Rolls-Royce/Bentley's rationalized, postwar fare ---


is not marketing them as crisply as R-R did their Silver Dawn/R-Type.


The hands down clumsiest, most inept thing Packard ever did was market the junior cars as juniors, and that because the GM production men they recruited beginning in 1933 to teach them how to build the fine One Twenty later took over the Company, reverting to all they really knew--- building B-O-P.

You didn't see R-R/Bentley doing that idiocy, nor BMW and Mercedes today with their 3-,5-,7-Series and C-, E-, S-Class.

People will gladly buy "personal sized," "sporty," "town" vs. country. But no one wants to purchase anything advertised as downscale, Mickey Mouse, which is exactly what Packard did with their embarrassingly lame junior ads.

https://lpo.energy.gov/?page_id=45

At bottom of page at this link is listed the car companies that got ATVM loan money. This is another way that Ford got bailed out under the radar of public scrutiny. The merits of EV tech and government involvement aside, Tesla and Fisker got 1/10th the amount that Ford did yet somehow managed to start car companies from scratch. Where did the Ford money go? To overhaul Wayne Assembly on Michigan Ave. amongst other things. Other car companies would have done this type of upgrade as part of normal business operations.

From 1924-28, Packard came up with a great way to print money. They made one set of bodies then affixed two hood length/engine combos to it. The Six sold 5 times as many Eights and paid for most of the amortization, the Eights generated the prestige.

Packard tried the same thing in 1937 with the Junior series. Problem was, now they were carrying two vehicle platforms including the old Seniors. They were reluctant to make the mental leap that a Junior could spawn a Senior even though that is exactly what happened in 1924.

One could argue that 1937 was the point at which to drop the old Seniors and, instead of adding the 115, add a new Junior-based Super Eight or Twelve with 5 inches added to the One Twenty's hood. Such a strategy continued into '38 with the all steel bodies and including a line of 3-box sedans and perhaps lower height might have made life at EGB very good indeed. As it was, Packard went into 1940 with a Junior and sub-Junior hood length and carried the strategy into the Clipper series. For 1951 they got rid of the sub-Junior hood.

I think the idea is much like Buick's (2 bodies x 2 engines = 4 models, Special, Super, Century, Roadmaster) and not that dissimilar to what Packard did in 1940-1941's 110 - 120 - 160 swb. I don't think either company did a particularly good job of distinguishing the models from a marketing/styling standpoint. Packard nuts like us may be able to tell a 120 from a 160, but even old car guys have a hard time. But it was a lot easier to tell a Buick from a Cadillac. The resource (and idea?) insufficiency may have been in not having a second new style to complement the Clipper. Get ready to cringe: the bathtub was a Clipper derivative which looker different and yes more modern (the fuselage bodies of Nash, Hudson, Frazer, and Packard were more modern than market bully GM).

Imagine in 1947-48 a clipper facelift with the 282/288 and a more extensively modified version with the 356. Then in 1950 an OHV V8 in the same bodies. then new bodies in 1951