Packard Clipper
Encyclopedia
The Packard Clipper was initially a single model of the Packard Motor Car Company introduced in April, 1941, midyear, much as was the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang and other new departures. It was manufactured between 1942 and 1947, from the six and junior eight, to the Super-8, where it cost more than and outperformed corresponding Cadillacs. The Clipper name alone was reintroduced in 1953 for the Company's bottom line through 1956, in which final year it was considered a stand alone make, and not a model of Packard.
had arrived in 1935 and saved the company from immediate demise; the One-Ten
had followed, achieving even higher volume. But despite a strong performance in revival year 1937, Packard sales had plummeted as the depression returned in 1938, and the 76,000 sales for the calendar year 1939 were hardly past the break-even point. To be precise, they netted the company a scant half million dollars. This precarious financial state combined with the new model developments among Packard’s rivals meant that Gilman needed something radically new, and that he needed it in a hurry if he wanted to save the company.
Introduced a just eight months before The Attack on Pearl Harbor, Packard’s hopes for the future rode on a new car design. The milestone Packard Clipper represented an almost total break from traditional styling and embodied an abrupt change in construction techniques. However, with the attack on Pearl Harbor pulling the United States into war, the fate of the radically new Clipper was irrevocably altered. Instead of a fresh new interpretation of traditional Packard styling—the basis for a plethora of new luxury body styles—it was cut off from the showrooms by World War II
. By the time it returned, management was too busy to consider that they had in the Clipper the key to regaining Packard’s luxury image. The investment to produce the only all-new 1941 American car had been squandered; it led only to a compounding of earlier mistakes: a postwar round of non-luxury Packards which in the end proved fatal to the Packard Motor Car Company.
The Clipper’s historical importance lies in its timing and the result that timing had on subsequent decisions which so crucially affected Packard’s later years. In these events, we can see that the Clipper represented a continuum: Packard’s timeless styling hallmarks combined with the modern envelope body was as effective a mating of the old and the new as anyone could point to in American automobile history. Management abandoned that continuum in a decision that almost immediately affected the Packard image, inflicting a wound that would prove terminal by the mid-1950s, yet its decision was not at all extraordinary or unexpected at the time.
There was only one other auto maker that introduced all-new 1941 models which were stopped short by the American entry into World War II and thus rendered obsolete before their time. Other than Packard, only Ford brought out a much changed design for the 1941 model year—the restyled Ford and its Mercury clone. No other manufacturers introduced new 1941 models. General Motors redesigned for 1942, arguably a piece of bad timing even worse than Packard’s, but the 1942’s were so few in number that they still looked new when GM resumed automotive production in 1946. The Ford/Mercury comparison is not apt either, primarily because these were quite different cars from Pac kards, with no pretence of luxury. Nor did their design history mirror the Clipper’s. The 1941 Fords and Mercurys were evolutionary developments, clearly related to the ‘40’s they replaced. The Clipper was such a dramatic break with previous Packard design as to preclude comparisons.
After the war, while Packard opted to improve the Clipper (1948), Ford chose a total restyle for Ford and Mercury in 1949. And, while the bulbous 1941-48 Fords and Mercs were replaced by superior modern designs, the elegant Clipper was replaced by a bulbous upgrade that owed nothing to modernity. It is not entirely coincidental that a 1949 Mercury Eight
which had cost $2,000 new was still worth $430 five years later, while a 1949 Packard Eight which had cost $2,200 new was worth only $375. Motor Trend's Tom McCahill, who'd raved about the Packard Clipper, called the '48 Packard "a goat."
The Clipper’s timing was unique. The state of the world being beyond Packard’s control, Clipper production came to a halt February 9th, 1942, just as it was hitting its stride—just as Clipper styling had spread through the entire Packard model line up.
was wearing pontoon fenders and flowing lines by 1934 and had adopted all-steel bodies by 1935. In 1936, Lincoln
announced the Zephyr, with an all steel unit-body and a shape so advanced that derivations of it were still in production twelve years later. By comparison, Packard adhered to tradition if crisp, conservative styling. Its main acknowledgement of new-era styling was the skirted fender which appeared in 1933. Packard, like Lincoln and Cadillac, had survived the Depression by building medium-priced cars: the One Twenty, Zephyr and LaSalle, respectively. But unlike its rivals, Packard styling had remained arch-traditional. Unlike Lincoln, Packard followed its medium-priced One-Twenty with an almost-low-priced car, the Six (later briefly known as the One Ten). Unlike Cadillac, Packard refused to market its cheaper models by a different name and remained wedded to them long after prosperity had returned. By 1941, the year the Clipper debuted, the cheapest Cadillac cost $1,445; the cheapest Packard sold for only $927.
Arguably its conservative design philosophy had stood Packard well in the years leading up to the Clipper. The company was able to advertise—and sold quite a few Packards with—styling continuity from year to year. There was a family resemblance between a ’39, say, and a ’32. In 1939 comparison of its One Twenty with the LaSalle, the company declared that: “Packard has style identity...Packard styling is consistent..But look at the 1938 LaSalle! About the only similarity is in the name, and who can be sure that a sudden fanciful style change won’t make the 1939 a style orphan?”
Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royce survived for years with very expensive obsolete designs. Packard also survived with limited styling change for at least eight or nine years up through 1940. What’s more, Packard hallmarks were very good ones: the chiseled frontispiece; the grille recalling classic Greek architecture; the ox-yoke radiator/bonnet shape that harked back to the noble Model L of 1904. What’s more, the pelican mascot, red hexagon hubs and arrowhead side-spear were a combination at least as recognizable and timeless as the stand-up hood ornament and meshwork grille of Mercedes-Benz. Together, these consistent hallmarks unmistakably said “Packard” to school children and bankers alike and had been the adornments of the chosen transport of moneyed America since Packard’s Boss of the Road Six and Twin Six of the Teens and early Twenties.
To create a modern envelope body while retaining those famous hallmarks was no small undertaking. It is still one of the chief accomplishments of automotive industrial design that the people who created the Packard Clipper were able to do so flawlessly. Advertising invited America to “Skipper the Clipper” in 1941. It was showing the country an obviously brand-new, up-to-date, in Packard's words, “Windstream" or "Speed-Stream" automobile, yet one that was undeniably a Packard. Though it didn’t owe a curve or contour to any previous model, the milestone '41 Clipper carried the same inimitable radiator and hood shape, the same arrowheads and red hexes, the same long hood and close-coupled profile of great Packards of the past. The smooth styling transition was a stroke of genius.
When the Clipper debuted in late spring, 1941, many thought it more succefully avant garde than the 1936-37 Cord 810/812, more offhandedly elegant than Lincoln's Zephyr, which many wags called a "Ford and a half."
Faced with the same conundrum of appearing modern, an envelope body at odds with a mandatory trademark, a vertical radiator grille, Rolls-Royce could do little better in autumn, 1955 than offer a razor-edged 1941 Packard Clipper, albeit with a curved, one-piece winshield, as their new Silver Cloud and concurrent Bentley S-series.
Prior to World War II
, Packard, like most auto companies at the time, did not have a styling department. It was Harley Earl’s formidable Art & Colour Section at General Motors that convinced the industry of the importance of styling. But even Earl’s efforts didn’t force rivals to add design departments until after the war. A handful of outside consultants, like Raymond Loewy at Studebaker, occasionally sold their designs to American producers. Sometimes the designs even reached production without drastic changes by the body engineers, who at that point largely controlled the shape of cars. One such design consultant was a Californian named Howard “Dutch” Darrin, whose involvement in the Clipper occurred because Packard was his favourite American make.
While Darrin was alive, his claim to the Clipper was never challenged. Enough is known now to realize that the Clipper wasn’t entirely Darrin’s work.
After returning to America in 1937 following a successful career as a Paris coachbuilder, Darrin looked around for chassis on which to practice his automotive art. He said, “I concentrated on Packards knowing that by lowering the radiator I could make a very beautiful custom-bodied Packard with little change in its basic structure.” The result was a long skein of dramatic Packard-Darrins, which were actually catalogued be the company at one point and which led to Darrin’s role in the Clipper. “Around 1940, Packard called and asked if I’d design a new standard line car for them. The hitch was that I had only ten days to do so, Chief stylist Ed Macauley (actually vice-president for design) would be on the coast for that amount of time, and if I didn’t have anything before he left, it would be a lost cause. The company offered me a thousand dollars a day if I could meet the deadline.”
Confident in his ability to put a thousand a day to good use, Darrin said he thought he “could establish enough lines for a full- and quarter-scale model.” Later he said that to meet the deadline, he “slept several nights on a drafting table, “ yet Packard never paid him.
Kaiser-Frazer stylist Bob Robillard admitted that Darrin had held onto his claim as originator of the Clipper almost from the start. He still has copies of a 1946 Darrin paper delivered before the Society of Automotive Engineers, “Does Styling Control the Design of Cars?” In it Darrin states that he widened the Clipper body because the continuous fender-line, which comes right through the door past the A-pillar, required more width for the proper hinging of the door, “the net result being a wider and more roomy car.” Reithard disagrees. Before Darrin arrived, he remembered, “the parameters for track, wheelbase and overall length had been established. Other than that we had very little to go on except some very rough sketches and hand-waving from Darrin.”
But a quarter century later in Automobile Quarterly, Darrin was still repeating his 1946 claims, which were not challenged at the time. As Darrin stated: “Packard introduced the Clipper with a series of ads entitled, ‘A Star is Born,’” which he considered inaccurate. “The best compliment they paid me was stating that ‘three international designers’ combined to create the Clipper.” Packard was evidently referring to Darrin. George Walker (another outside consultant) and Briggs, all of whom had contributed to the design. But Darrin typically had his own interpretation: "You might construe that to mean that I was the equal of three designers.”
While Darrin clearly held himself the central design figure, his view of the final production car was equivocal—and also providescleas as to what truly happened. Darrin’s original design “called for a sweeping frond fender-line that carried right through the doors to the rise of the rear fender, similar to a custom Clipper I built later for Errol Flynn. But Packard shortened the sweep to fade away at mid-door. This was done as a hedge because no one knew if the through-fender-line would sell.” He said Packard Styling also “vandalized the design by throwing on huge gobs of clay along the wheelbase” creating a flair to the doors to hide the running boards they added for the same reason. Thus by Darrin’s own admission, the Clipper that appeared in production was not entirely his work. Few designers besides Darrin believed this splendid car was the product of ten days’ work. But success has many fathers, failure's an orphan.
The question of how much influence Darrin had therefore boils down to whether we accept Reithard’s remembrance that his model was discarded. Even if this was the case, automotive design is a group sport. There is no telling, so many years removed, the degree of Darrin’s influence over Howard Yeager, Werner Gubitz, Phil Wright or George Walker. One can only surmise. But based on Alex Tremulis’ recollections, we might well grant Darrin a degree of credit. The lines of the Clipper definitely recall certain Darrin themes which Tremulis with his professional eye recognized. The elegant curves and the long hood, the sweep of the fender (whether or not it swept all the way back) and the sheer presence of the car relate to the Darrin Packards. For example, superimpose the 1941 Clipper, or 1942-47 senior Clipper four-door sedan, over Darrin's 1940 Packard One-Eighty Sport Sedan. If Darrin’s pen didn’t create those lines, there's no doubt his ideas influenced them.
As for Darrin Darrin not being paid or acknowledged for his Clipper design --the Company also cancelled his victoria contract after agreeing to increase it-- conservative, Detroit Athletic Club, Masonic Packard boardroom egos weren't about to admit their sole hit of the '40s was from an outspoken playboy/raconteur/auto designer who swore like a sailor, dallied with showgirls, and set up shop in Hollywood after Darryl F. Zanuck's assurances that the polo was good. But superimposing Darrin's 1940 Packard sport sedan over the Clipper vindicates Darrin's paternity claims. The long hood, raked windshield, roof and deck lines scream Darrin.
At the time Packard contacted Darrin about designing a production car in the theme of his limited-production victorias, the Company was, according to Darrin, "....so afraid of GM they couldn't see straight." GM's new C bodies, introduced midway through the 1940 model year, made Packard's traditional bodies, only facelifted since their 1938 introduction, look inferior. Packard had, as Darrin said, "....the best chassis in the industry." The upper echelon GMobiles looked more modern, sporting than Packard's traditional '41 bodies.
The Clipper changed that. The only thing hindering the Clipper's ascendency was War II, and after the war, the sheet steel shortages and strikes at vendors that plagued all independents. After the war, for example, Chrysler was held up for weeks just by a strike at the supplier of their door locks. Being a holding company, GM was better to able to weather this situation.
Perhaps the best summation of the Clipper’s design comes from Joel Prescott: “The truth may well be that the Clipper should be remembered as automotive history’s most successful committee design, because assigning the genius of its beautiful lines exclusively to one particular designer cannot now be done with any degree of certainty.” And as it turned out, this new look guaranteed the Clipper an appearance never compromised by competitive imitators. In 1942 Cadillac and Buick adopted the same pontoon fender line, but the Clipper still looked unique, apart from and slightly above the crowd, especially the new '42 senior Clippers, which alone retained the debut '41's 127-inch wheelbase, longer hood and front fenders.
The original milestone 1941 Clipper rode the senior wheelbase of 127 inches (3,225.8 mm) and used the One Twenty’s 282 CID straight eight, but produced 125 bhp (five more than the One Twenty). Despite the familiar engine, few Clipper parts were interchangeable with other models. The chassis was entirely new: a double-drop frame allowed a lower floor without reducing road clearance. The engine was mounted well forward and the rear shocks were angled to assist the traditional Packard fifth shock in controlling side-sway. The front suspension was entirely new, since the lower frame eliminated the need for Packard’s traditional long torque arms. A double-link connection between the Pitman arm and steering brackets, with a cross bar and idler arm and two cross tubes, controlled wheel movement.
The 1941 Clipper was the widest production car in the industry and first to be wider than it was tall—a foot wider to be exact. The body from cowl to deck was a single piece of steel—largest in the industry, and the floor pan had only one welded seam from end to end. Single pieces of sheet metal comprised the rear quarters and hood. The hood could be lifted from either side of the car or removed entirely by throwing two levers. Instead of the traditional third side window, ventipanes were incorporated in the rear doors, providing controllable flow-through ventilation. The battery made its first move from under the seat to under the hood, where it stayed warmer and was more accessible. There was a “Ventalarm” whistle to warn when the tank was within a gallon of being full, and an accelerator-activated starter button, so the act of starting simultaneously set the automatic choke. Reithard’s beautiful symmetrical dashboard contained a full ration of instruments, including an electric oil pressure gauge adapted from the One Sixty. Options included Packard’s Electromatic clutch, which let the driver ignore the clutch pedal in ordinary driving; "Aerodrive” (overdrive); an effective auxiliary under-seat heater, leather upholstery, fender skirts, and, for $275, air conditioning-- a Packard first, introduced on all eight-cylinder 1940 models.
Introduced in April 1941 as a single four-door sedan model, the Clipper was by no means a cheap or even medium-priced car. It sold for around $1,400, in a market niche between the One Twenty and One Sixty, competing with the Cadillac Sixty-One, Lincoln Zephyr, Buick Roadmaster and Chrysler New Yorker. Despite a late start, it garnered 16,600 model year sales, almost as many as the One Twenty. Clearly, for Packard, it was the wave of the future. By the 1942 model year, Clipper styling had permeated every Packard in the line, except where special tooling existed—convertibles, taxis, wagons and commercial cars. Curiously, however, the market slot occupied by the ’41 Clipper was abandoned, recreating a gap between the Clipper One Twenty Custom ($1.341) and the Clipper One Sixty ($1,688).
The bulk of the 1942 production was concentrated on the 120 inches (3,048 mm) wheelbase junior models, but the One Sixty and One Eighty Clippers proved conclusively that Packard was as much a builder of luxury cars as ever. The 1942 One Sixty sedan, for example, was 9.5 inches (241.3 mm) longer and 140 pounds (63.5 kg) heaver than its square-rigged 1941 predecessor. The One Eighty was wider, almost as long, with more interior width, and with almost as much legroom as the long-wheel-base 1942 One Eighty, which still used the old-style Packard bodywork.
The silky smooth 356 CID straight eight of the One Sixty and One Eighty Clippers, with its 104 pounds (47.2 kg), nine-main-bearing crankshaft and hydraulic valve lifters, was the most powerful engine in the industry through 1947, exceeding Cadillac’s V-8 by 15 hp. It could deliver 70 miles per hour (112.7 km/h) in second gear overdrive and circulate the huge Packard Proving Grounds banked oval track at over 100 mph, marvellous for a 4000 pounds (1,814.4 kg) luxury car in 1942. Its prodigious torque would allow it to walk away from a dead stop . . . in second gear. . . up hill. You could (and Packard did) balance a nickel on the head with the engine idling. It's interesting to note that in 1950, ten years after Packard's nonpareil nine-main-bearing 356 inline 8 debuted, Rolls-Royce echoed it in their nine-mained, F-head 346-ci B-80 inline 8, used only in a handful of Phantom IVs produced solely for heads of state, military vehicles, and Dennis fire trucks. Like Packard's husky 245-ci six used in junior Clippers, Packard's 1940-50 356 Super-8 engine was widely used as a marine engine.
The top of the line Clipper One Eighty offered two shades of leather or six colors of wool broadcloth upholstery, Mosstred carpeting from New York’s Shulton Looms, walnut grained instrument panels, amboyna burl garnish moldings, seatbacks stuffed with down and rear center armrests. Unlike any other contemporary, the post war Custom Super’s headliner was seamed fore to aft instead of sideways. Packard claimed that the unique headliner was adopted “to provide a more spacious feel to the interior.” That these superb luxury cars were built for the classes and not the masses is attested by the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA), which granted “Classic” status to the 1946-47 Super and Custom Super Clipper, among the few postwar cars so recognized, as they are continuations of the 1942 Super-8 One-Sixty and Custom Super-8 One-Eighty Clippers, their postwar names streamlined in keeping with their sleek shape.
With a nearly-full line of Clippers, Packard managed to build 34,000 1942 models before production ceased in February (an annual rate of around 80,000). According to the late John Reinhart, there is no doubt that Clipper styling would have proliferated in 1943-45. “The next logical step would have been convertibles and commercials—and a wagon.” But the war intervened. Whereas Cadillac with its greater facilities was able to field a complete line of restyled ‘42’s including convertibles, all of which came right back in 1946, Packard was able only to add a club coupe body before the war.
The club coupe was a magnificent looking car—the sportiest and rarest Clipper destined to be built. Only about 40 are thought to have been built before production closed down in 1942; a single One Sixty is the only example known to exist. Postwar, scarcely 600 senior coupes came off the production lines, compared to about 6,600 senior sedans as Packard emphasized the more popular four-door body style.
In 1946-47 the numerical designations were dropped and the line consisted of Clipper Sixes and Eights on the 120 inches (3,048 mm) wheelbase and Supers and Custom Supers on the 127 inches (3,225.8 mm) wheelbase. For the first time there were now seven-passenger sedans and limousines, riding a 148 inches (3,759.2 mm) wheelbase. For their type, these “professional Packards” enjoyed excellent success. They compare favorably with Cadillac’s 1946-47 Seventy-five, beating it not only be 15 hp but by a foot of wheelbase, yet selling for about the same $4,500-$5,000. Counting several thousand bare chassis supplied to commercial body manufacturers, the Seventy-five outsold the long wheelbase Clipper; but for finished cars from the factory, production was dead even: about 3,100 cars each for 1946-47 combined.
The postwar economy, of course, proved the experts wrong. It was so healthy that many materials, notably sheet steel, were in short supply. Workers demanded more money, and so the automakers and their suppliers endured a series of strikes. These factors, of course, strangled production. At the same time, Americans had money jingling in their pockets, and they were willing to spend freely to acquire most anything—especially new cars. Price, it seemed, hardly mattered. Packard thus found itself in a dilemma, whether or not it realized it. On the one hand, the firm couldn’t even begin to produce cars in the numbers it had intended. On the other, the cars it did turn out were mainly the less profitable junior-series models.
Packard management’s chief interest after the war was in the same medium-priced cars that had saved it in the Depression, the Six and junior Eights. The company was still firmly run by President George Christopher, who had helped save it with the One Twenty, and whose most famous remark refers to the luxury Packards as “goddamn senior stuff.” Christopher had junior Clippers in production by October 1945, but it wasn’t until June 1946 that the first Custom Super came down the line. Total Packard production in the first two postwar model years was 82,000, against 91,000 Cadillacs. The difference was that the vast bulk of Packard production was of Clipper Sixes and Eights priced $1,700-2,200. The Cadillacs (except for the fast-diminishing Sixty-one) began around $2,300. Quite obviously, Packard could have built, and sold, almost as many senior Clippers as Cadillac sold Sixty-two’s and Sixty Specials, had Christopher and his team chosen to do so.
Clearly, the long-wheelbase Clippers were competitive with the Cadillac and the low-volume Chrysler Crown Imperial (Lincoln had no long models) in the first two postwar years. Likewise, among owner-driver models, Packard had Cadillac neatly bracketed. The Cadillac Sixty-two sedan and coupe started around $2.300 in 1946—about the same price as the Super Clipper. Against Cadillac’s $3,100 Sixty Special, which came only as a four-door sedan, Packard offered the all-out-luxury Custom Super Clipper sedan or coupe for about the same money, albeit on a slightly shorter wheelbase. While it’s true that the 1946-47 Sixty-two and Sixty Special outsold the Super and Custom Clipper by three to one, contrary to common impression, that was something that Packard could have done something about.
This is a new point which has been missed in the many postmortems of Packard’s fall: that reverting to the status of a producer strictly luxury cars would not have meant downsizing the labor force or contracting the facilities. The market for anything on wheels was bottomless; it didn’t matter whether the car cost $1,800 (Clipper Eight). $2,300 (Clipper Super) or $2,900 (Custom Super). It would have sold. Nor is this a hindsight judgement, since Packard management was capable of seeing this at the time. At the start of postwar car production, Fortune recorded a consensus that “there now exists a market for from 12 to 14 million cars,” and that was in a day when three million or so cars was considered a very good year. “In 1941,” Fortune continued, “The 32 million American families owned 29,600,000 cars . . . As 1946 began, the cars were down to 22 million which is not very far from the danger point (18 million) of a transportation breakdown . . . of this remaining total, at least half are in their last days.” It didn’t take a mystic to comprehend these facts, as the late Hickman Price, Jr., who bought Willow Run for the Kaiser-Frazer partners, once said: “I believed we would have a period of three or four years—I remember putting 1950 as the terminal date in which we can sell everything we can make.”
Almost immediately after production got rolling in 1945, chief stylist John Reinhart was told, much against his judgment, to update the Clipper. If Dutch Darrin had thought Packard loaded “gobs of clay” onto his original model in 1941, what must he have thought of the 1948 models? Furthermore, there was no change in market orientation, still rooted firmly in the medium price field. Indeed in 1948, the final year for President George Christopher, senior Packard production dwindled from 30 percent to 11 percent of total production, trailing Cadillac by tens of thousands. Packards, as a later president, James Nance, stated, “just handed the luxury car market to Cadillac on a silver platter.”
Professional designers have contemplated continuations of the Clipper into 1948-49, with a broader range of body styles including hardtops and convertibles. Their designs were beautiful and would have kept pace with the all-new Cadillacs and Lincolns of 1949, allowing Packard to come back with its first postwar redesign in 1950. But this is the lesser point: the key failure was to reorder the corporation’s priorities and establish it once again as the American luxury car it had been so successfully for forty years.
Hindsight does suggest that Packard lost its battle for survival at this point, although it wouldn’t be evident immediately. Since the company couldn’t achieve high volume, it would have been more logical to maximize the profit from each car it could build. Not only were customers standing in line, but by putting top-of-the-line Packards on the road, the public’s image of Packard as a luxury car builder would have been enhanced. Worse still, the 1948 facelift lost the design continuum the Clipper had so brilliantly offered. These elegant and inimitable lines dating back to the early years of the century, so laboriously maintained by countless Packard designers over the years, almost instantly departed. Though it retained the Clipper’s basic shell, the 1948 model bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Although it was as brilliantly engineered and was as fine a performer as before, the 1948 iteration no longer looked the part of a luxury Packard. The bulbous “up-side-down bathtubs” owed nothing to modernity and never gained much popularity. Market share suffered at a time when Packard should have, and could have become the luxury car leader again. They could have been ahead of the styling curve, not behind it. If the release of the Clipper had been saved until after the war, and if it would have been in a style closer to the one Howard “Dutch” Darrin proposed for the styling team in 1940, Packard would have been in a position of styling leadership and the 1948 “pregnant elephant” Packards could have resembled the “high-line” style released in 1951. The designs of the ’51 cars were on the drawing boards shortly after the war, but instead, Packard management settled for facelifts.
The money spent on the facelifts, John Reinhart and many others always maintained should have gone into an expansion of Clipper body styles to compete with Cadillac. Packard recognized this too late when it brought out a convertible as the first ’48 body style—a model it should have had by 1947 at the latest. Eighteen months later Cadillac was already out with the glamorous Coupe de Ville hardtop, while Packard’s newest model was . . . the Station Sedan.
It was already apparent to some advanced thinkers in 1948 that the future of the car business belonged to the giants. But the strategy would have placed Packard in a much stronger position for a successful merger around 1950-51. At least one independent manufacturer was ready to make that happen; George Mason, President of Nash-Kelvinator. Mason wanted a postwar combination of independents, a fourth player in an automotive Big Four, with Packard as the luxury division.
Yet all independents were doomed. By 1954, there was only a "Big Two," Chrysler's market share falling to 12.9%. All Cadillacs had been downsized for 1936, were effectively junior cars ever since, increasingly sharing components with lesser divisions. For example, a 1941 Cadillac convertible shares every piece of sheet metal with the '41 Pontiac ragtop. Rolls-Royce was principally an aero engine manufacturer since 1935, the cars an increasingly boutique sideline, an "assembled" product cribbing from Buick, Packard, Chrysler, postwar R-Rs and Bentleys having bodies stamped by Pressed Steel of Cowley, who also served much of the rest of British automakers.
Packard failed to groom new management. Despite handsome postwar cash reserves, Packard stuck with their dated, if smooth, dependable, L-head eights through 1954 against a field of ohv V-8s, box office poison in the sellers' market returning in 1949. But by the 1950s these were moot points. No independent could get unit costs and tool amortization down to GM/Ford levels, or afford costly TV advertising and annual model changes. But this is another story—another chapter in the sad decline of what Don Vorderman has called “the car we couldn’t afford to lose.”
The Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Series (from mid-1949) cars wore the "upside-down bathtub" styling that was briefly in vogue in the late 1940s. Unfortunately for Packard, Nash
, Lincoln-Mercury
, and Hudson
, the four manufacturers who embraced this type of styling, General Motors introduced designs that were lower-slung, more tightly-drawn and less bulbous at around the same time. GM's designs quickly caught the buying public's fancy, while the "bathtubs" quickly fell from favor.
Following a round of bitter corporate infighting in 1949, Packard management finally decided to phase out the "bathtubs" and create the all-new Twenty-Fourth Series for 1951. The new "high-pockets" design (so called because of its high beltline) was much more modern. However, Packard continued to push hard into the lower end of the mid-priced field with its new "200" and "250" models, which was dominated at the time by Oldsmobile, DeSoto and others. James J. Nance
became the company's president in 1952, and he immediately set to work on divorcing the lower-priced cars from the higher-end Packards. To this end, he decreed that the 200 and 250 would be consolidated into a new line of Clippers for 1953.
Nance originally had hoped to introduce the new "Clipper" as a stand-alone marque, targeting the mid range price field which he felt was dragging the Packard image down. When word was leaked to the Packard dealer network that they would be losing their best selling Packard model to "Clipper", they balked. As an appeasement, Nance rolled the Clipper out as a Packard, and worked to transition the cars toward their own make. Thus, the Packard Clipper name was reintroduced and applied to the company's entry-level models, previously known as the Packard 200
, beginning in 1953. Clippers were available in Special and Deluxe trim models, as two and four door sedans. A 1953 Clipper went from 0-60mph in 17.6 seconds in a Popular Mechanics test. The turning circle was 41ft.
For 1954, the "Clipper by Packard" was given its own unique rear fender trim and tail lights to further differentiate it from traditional Packards. The cars were also available with a distinctive two-tone paint pattern. For 1955, Packard became a marque in the newly formed Studebaker-Packard Corporation
. The 1955 Clipper Custom offered torsion-bar suspension something not offered on other models, which only offered coil
and leaf spring
suspension. It also had a power steering option. Drivers enjoyed the comfortable ride but complained of door rattles and poor workmanship.
The Packard Clipper Constellation was a two-door hardtop automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation
in model years 1955 and 1956. The 1955 model was a Packard
product and sold as part of the Packard Clipper line; for 1956, Clipper
split from Packard, becoming its own make.
A total of 8,039 Clipper Deluxe, 14,995 Super and 15,380 Custom was built during model year 1955.
realized, although by this time, most experts would later agree, it was too late. The Clipper
was now its own separate registered marque, manufactured and sold by the Packard-Clipper Division of Nance's Studebaker-Packard Corporation
.
Existing Packard dealers were required to execute a Clipper dealer franchise sales agreement, but once again, most cried foul and, not long into the model year, "Packard" script emblems began to be placed on the decklids of new Clippers that rolled off the company's Detroit assembly line. In a complete reversal of Nance's strategy, the emblems were also made available for placement on already-built cars that were languishing on dealers' lots across the country.
By the summer of 1956, Studebaker-Packard was in deep financial trouble. The Packards and Clippers were not selling at anywhere near a profitable level, and the company's creditors refused to advance any further money to the company for new tooling that would have allowed Nance to finally realize his ultimate goal of sharing body components among the company's three lines of cars. In late July, the last Packards and Clippers rolled out of the Conner Avenue factory.
Packard plant, Studebaker-Packard entered into a management contract with the Curtiss-Wright
Company. Under C-W's president, Roy T. Hurley, S-P's new president Harold Churchill approved production of a new Packard, to be built in Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana
plant. The new Packards, originally to continue the Packard Executive
nameplate, were to share the Studebaker President
four-door sedan body and new four-door station wagon body as well. The total tooling cost of the new Packard was estimated at roughly $1 million. At some point, however, the Executive name was dropped, as all of the Packards produced for 1957 carried the Packard Clipper name.
In order to keep the tooling cost as low as possible, trim components from the 1956 Clippers were used. This was done to make the 1957 model differ in appearance from the President; outside, this included a narrower Packard-style front bumper and 1956 Clipper tail lamps and wheel covers. Inside, the cars' dashboards were fitted with the same basic instrument cluster as used in the previous two years.
Sales of the new Clippers were not great; historians differ as to why, although the cars' obvious Studebaker origins (which led the new Clippers to be derisively nicknamed "Packardbaker
s" by many people) certainly didn't help. Only about 4,600 were sold for the year.
For 1958, the Clipper name was discontinued, and the few Packard automobiles that were produced (four-door sedans, station wagons, and two-door hardtop coupes) were simply known by their marque name. The only exception to this was the Packard Hawk
, which was based on the Studebaker Golden Hawk
.
As planned, Studebaker and Clipper cars would have been built around a shared chassis and inner body structure, but both cars would have had distinctly different outer styling. Photos exist of a proposed Clipper with tailfins, a flat roofline, crisply-drawn lower body features and even slight fins over the headlamps that extended back, flowing seamlessly into the tops of the long front fenders.
All in all, the proposed look was thoroughly modern and would certainly have made an interesting contrast when compared to the bulky, rounded 1957-58 Oldsmobile
against which it would have competed. One is led to wonder, however, how the proposed car would have fared in the market given the "Eisenhower recession" that began in late 1957 and extended through much of 1958, when so many other established marques such as Oldsmobile, Buick
and DeSoto
had a tough time selling cars.
The 1941-47 Packard Clipper
By the end of the 1930s, Packard president Max M. Gilman realized that his best efforts to improve profitability during the last lean decade had not been enough. The Packard One-TwentyPackard One-Twenty
The Packard One-Twenty was an automobile produced by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan from 1935 to 1937 and from 1939 through the 1941 model years...
had arrived in 1935 and saved the company from immediate demise; the One-Ten
Packard One-Ten
The Packard One-Ten was a range of six-cylinder automobiles produced by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan during the 1940 and 1941 model years...
had followed, achieving even higher volume. But despite a strong performance in revival year 1937, Packard sales had plummeted as the depression returned in 1938, and the 76,000 sales for the calendar year 1939 were hardly past the break-even point. To be precise, they netted the company a scant half million dollars. This precarious financial state combined with the new model developments among Packard’s rivals meant that Gilman needed something radically new, and that he needed it in a hurry if he wanted to save the company.
Introduced a just eight months before The Attack on Pearl Harbor, Packard’s hopes for the future rode on a new car design. The milestone Packard Clipper represented an almost total break from traditional styling and embodied an abrupt change in construction techniques. However, with the attack on Pearl Harbor pulling the United States into war, the fate of the radically new Clipper was irrevocably altered. Instead of a fresh new interpretation of traditional Packard styling—the basis for a plethora of new luxury body styles—it was cut off from the showrooms by World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. By the time it returned, management was too busy to consider that they had in the Clipper the key to regaining Packard’s luxury image. The investment to produce the only all-new 1941 American car had been squandered; it led only to a compounding of earlier mistakes: a postwar round of non-luxury Packards which in the end proved fatal to the Packard Motor Car Company.
The Clipper’s historical importance lies in its timing and the result that timing had on subsequent decisions which so crucially affected Packard’s later years. In these events, we can see that the Clipper represented a continuum: Packard’s timeless styling hallmarks combined with the modern envelope body was as effective a mating of the old and the new as anyone could point to in American automobile history. Management abandoned that continuum in a decision that almost immediately affected the Packard image, inflicting a wound that would prove terminal by the mid-1950s, yet its decision was not at all extraordinary or unexpected at the time.
Initial reception
Unfortunately for the Packard company, the Clipper’s timing couldn’t have been worse. After only 16,600 of the 1941 models were made, and a few thousand 1942’s, Detroit stopped building civilian automobiles to concentrate on defense production. By the time cars began rolling off the lines again in late 1945, the still sleek Clipper's impact had been diminished by four years of war. The bright promise of its debut was limited by late introduction; what should have been its solid sophomore year was weakened by World War II. Its third and fourth years were postponed until 1946-47. Though Packard designer John Reinhart and other Company insiders wanted to retain and "sweeten (in Reinhart's word)" the Clipper's svelte lines, Packard management felt pressured by new postwar designs throughout the industry, introducing the mixed review "bathtub" or "pregnant elephant" 1948-50 Packards.There was only one other auto maker that introduced all-new 1941 models which were stopped short by the American entry into World War II and thus rendered obsolete before their time. Other than Packard, only Ford brought out a much changed design for the 1941 model year—the restyled Ford and its Mercury clone. No other manufacturers introduced new 1941 models. General Motors redesigned for 1942, arguably a piece of bad timing even worse than Packard’s, but the 1942’s were so few in number that they still looked new when GM resumed automotive production in 1946. The Ford/Mercury comparison is not apt either, primarily because these were quite different cars from Pac kards, with no pretence of luxury. Nor did their design history mirror the Clipper’s. The 1941 Fords and Mercurys were evolutionary developments, clearly related to the ‘40’s they replaced. The Clipper was such a dramatic break with previous Packard design as to preclude comparisons.
After the war, while Packard opted to improve the Clipper (1948), Ford chose a total restyle for Ford and Mercury in 1949. And, while the bulbous 1941-48 Fords and Mercs were replaced by superior modern designs, the elegant Clipper was replaced by a bulbous upgrade that owed nothing to modernity. It is not entirely coincidental that a 1949 Mercury Eight
Mercury Eight
The Mercury Eight was the first Post War Mercury design, and the first named Mercury model . It has an 8 tube radio as an option. The engine was a Flathead V8 that produced slightly more power than the then also newly-designed 1949 Ford. A new overdrive system was optional, and was activated by a...
which had cost $2,000 new was still worth $430 five years later, while a 1949 Packard Eight which had cost $2,200 new was worth only $375. Motor Trend's Tom McCahill, who'd raved about the Packard Clipper, called the '48 Packard "a goat."
The Clipper’s timing was unique. The state of the world being beyond Packard’s control, Clipper production came to a halt February 9th, 1942, just as it was hitting its stride—just as Clipper styling had spread through the entire Packard model line up.
Style identity
A full envelope body of genuinely modern mien was a long time coming at the Packard Motor Car Company. CadillacCadillac
Cadillac is an American luxury vehicle marque owned by General Motors . Cadillac vehicles are sold in over 50 countries and territories, but mostly in North America. Cadillac is currently the second oldest American automobile manufacturer behind fellow GM marque Buick and is among the oldest...
was wearing pontoon fenders and flowing lines by 1934 and had adopted all-steel bodies by 1935. In 1936, Lincoln
Lincoln (automobile)
Lincoln is an American luxury vehicle brand of the Ford Motor Company. Lincoln vehicles are sold mostly in North America.-History:The company was founded in August 1915 by Henry M. Leland, one of the founders of Cadillac . During World War I, he left Cadillac which was sold to General Motors...
announced the Zephyr, with an all steel unit-body and a shape so advanced that derivations of it were still in production twelve years later. By comparison, Packard adhered to tradition if crisp, conservative styling. Its main acknowledgement of new-era styling was the skirted fender which appeared in 1933. Packard, like Lincoln and Cadillac, had survived the Depression by building medium-priced cars: the One Twenty, Zephyr and LaSalle, respectively. But unlike its rivals, Packard styling had remained arch-traditional. Unlike Lincoln, Packard followed its medium-priced One-Twenty with an almost-low-priced car, the Six (later briefly known as the One Ten). Unlike Cadillac, Packard refused to market its cheaper models by a different name and remained wedded to them long after prosperity had returned. By 1941, the year the Clipper debuted, the cheapest Cadillac cost $1,445; the cheapest Packard sold for only $927.
Arguably its conservative design philosophy had stood Packard well in the years leading up to the Clipper. The company was able to advertise—and sold quite a few Packards with—styling continuity from year to year. There was a family resemblance between a ’39, say, and a ’32. In 1939 comparison of its One Twenty with the LaSalle, the company declared that: “Packard has style identity...Packard styling is consistent..But look at the 1938 LaSalle! About the only similarity is in the name, and who can be sure that a sudden fanciful style change won’t make the 1939 a style orphan?”
Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royce survived for years with very expensive obsolete designs. Packard also survived with limited styling change for at least eight or nine years up through 1940. What’s more, Packard hallmarks were very good ones: the chiseled frontispiece; the grille recalling classic Greek architecture; the ox-yoke radiator/bonnet shape that harked back to the noble Model L of 1904. What’s more, the pelican mascot, red hexagon hubs and arrowhead side-spear were a combination at least as recognizable and timeless as the stand-up hood ornament and meshwork grille of Mercedes-Benz. Together, these consistent hallmarks unmistakably said “Packard” to school children and bankers alike and had been the adornments of the chosen transport of moneyed America since Packard’s Boss of the Road Six and Twin Six of the Teens and early Twenties.
To create a modern envelope body while retaining those famous hallmarks was no small undertaking. It is still one of the chief accomplishments of automotive industrial design that the people who created the Packard Clipper were able to do so flawlessly. Advertising invited America to “Skipper the Clipper” in 1941. It was showing the country an obviously brand-new, up-to-date, in Packard's words, “Windstream" or "Speed-Stream" automobile, yet one that was undeniably a Packard. Though it didn’t owe a curve or contour to any previous model, the milestone '41 Clipper carried the same inimitable radiator and hood shape, the same arrowheads and red hexes, the same long hood and close-coupled profile of great Packards of the past. The smooth styling transition was a stroke of genius.
When the Clipper debuted in late spring, 1941, many thought it more succefully avant garde than the 1936-37 Cord 810/812, more offhandedly elegant than Lincoln's Zephyr, which many wags called a "Ford and a half."
Faced with the same conundrum of appearing modern, an envelope body at odds with a mandatory trademark, a vertical radiator grille, Rolls-Royce could do little better in autumn, 1955 than offer a razor-edged 1941 Packard Clipper, albeit with a curved, one-piece winshield, as their new Silver Cloud and concurrent Bentley S-series.
Making of the 1941-47 Packard Clipper
Writing in The Classic Car and The Packard Cormorant, Joel Prescott published an account of the Clipper design which considerably revised the picture offered by George Hamlin and Dwight Heinmuller in Packard: A History of the Motor Car and The Company, published by Automotive Quarterly. The Cormorant has also published excerpts of James A. Ward’s book on the decline of the Packard Motor Car Company. The testimony of such designers as Howard Darrin, John Reinhart, William Reithard and Alex Tremulis is on the record.Prior to World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Packard, like most auto companies at the time, did not have a styling department. It was Harley Earl’s formidable Art & Colour Section at General Motors that convinced the industry of the importance of styling. But even Earl’s efforts didn’t force rivals to add design departments until after the war. A handful of outside consultants, like Raymond Loewy at Studebaker, occasionally sold their designs to American producers. Sometimes the designs even reached production without drastic changes by the body engineers, who at that point largely controlled the shape of cars. One such design consultant was a Californian named Howard “Dutch” Darrin, whose involvement in the Clipper occurred because Packard was his favourite American make.
While Darrin was alive, his claim to the Clipper was never challenged. Enough is known now to realize that the Clipper wasn’t entirely Darrin’s work.
After returning to America in 1937 following a successful career as a Paris coachbuilder, Darrin looked around for chassis on which to practice his automotive art. He said, “I concentrated on Packards knowing that by lowering the radiator I could make a very beautiful custom-bodied Packard with little change in its basic structure.” The result was a long skein of dramatic Packard-Darrins, which were actually catalogued be the company at one point and which led to Darrin’s role in the Clipper. “Around 1940, Packard called and asked if I’d design a new standard line car for them. The hitch was that I had only ten days to do so, Chief stylist Ed Macauley (actually vice-president for design) would be on the coast for that amount of time, and if I didn’t have anything before he left, it would be a lost cause. The company offered me a thousand dollars a day if I could meet the deadline.”
Confident in his ability to put a thousand a day to good use, Darrin said he thought he “could establish enough lines for a full- and quarter-scale model.” Later he said that to meet the deadline, he “slept several nights on a drafting table, “ yet Packard never paid him.
Kaiser-Frazer stylist Bob Robillard admitted that Darrin had held onto his claim as originator of the Clipper almost from the start. He still has copies of a 1946 Darrin paper delivered before the Society of Automotive Engineers, “Does Styling Control the Design of Cars?” In it Darrin states that he widened the Clipper body because the continuous fender-line, which comes right through the door past the A-pillar, required more width for the proper hinging of the door, “the net result being a wider and more roomy car.” Reithard disagrees. Before Darrin arrived, he remembered, “the parameters for track, wheelbase and overall length had been established. Other than that we had very little to go on except some very rough sketches and hand-waving from Darrin.”
But a quarter century later in Automobile Quarterly, Darrin was still repeating his 1946 claims, which were not challenged at the time. As Darrin stated: “Packard introduced the Clipper with a series of ads entitled, ‘A Star is Born,’” which he considered inaccurate. “The best compliment they paid me was stating that ‘three international designers’ combined to create the Clipper.” Packard was evidently referring to Darrin. George Walker (another outside consultant) and Briggs, all of whom had contributed to the design. But Darrin typically had his own interpretation: "You might construe that to mean that I was the equal of three designers.”
While Darrin clearly held himself the central design figure, his view of the final production car was equivocal—and also providescleas as to what truly happened. Darrin’s original design “called for a sweeping frond fender-line that carried right through the doors to the rise of the rear fender, similar to a custom Clipper I built later for Errol Flynn. But Packard shortened the sweep to fade away at mid-door. This was done as a hedge because no one knew if the through-fender-line would sell.” He said Packard Styling also “vandalized the design by throwing on huge gobs of clay along the wheelbase” creating a flair to the doors to hide the running boards they added for the same reason. Thus by Darrin’s own admission, the Clipper that appeared in production was not entirely his work. Few designers besides Darrin believed this splendid car was the product of ten days’ work. But success has many fathers, failure's an orphan.
The question of how much influence Darrin had therefore boils down to whether we accept Reithard’s remembrance that his model was discarded. Even if this was the case, automotive design is a group sport. There is no telling, so many years removed, the degree of Darrin’s influence over Howard Yeager, Werner Gubitz, Phil Wright or George Walker. One can only surmise. But based on Alex Tremulis’ recollections, we might well grant Darrin a degree of credit. The lines of the Clipper definitely recall certain Darrin themes which Tremulis with his professional eye recognized. The elegant curves and the long hood, the sweep of the fender (whether or not it swept all the way back) and the sheer presence of the car relate to the Darrin Packards. For example, superimpose the 1941 Clipper, or 1942-47 senior Clipper four-door sedan, over Darrin's 1940 Packard One-Eighty Sport Sedan. If Darrin’s pen didn’t create those lines, there's no doubt his ideas influenced them.
As for Darrin Darrin not being paid or acknowledged for his Clipper design --the Company also cancelled his victoria contract after agreeing to increase it-- conservative, Detroit Athletic Club, Masonic Packard boardroom egos weren't about to admit their sole hit of the '40s was from an outspoken playboy/raconteur/auto designer who swore like a sailor, dallied with showgirls, and set up shop in Hollywood after Darryl F. Zanuck's assurances that the polo was good. But superimposing Darrin's 1940 Packard sport sedan over the Clipper vindicates Darrin's paternity claims. The long hood, raked windshield, roof and deck lines scream Darrin.
At the time Packard contacted Darrin about designing a production car in the theme of his limited-production victorias, the Company was, according to Darrin, "....so afraid of GM they couldn't see straight." GM's new C bodies, introduced midway through the 1940 model year, made Packard's traditional bodies, only facelifted since their 1938 introduction, look inferior. Packard had, as Darrin said, "....the best chassis in the industry." The upper echelon GMobiles looked more modern, sporting than Packard's traditional '41 bodies.
The Clipper changed that. The only thing hindering the Clipper's ascendency was War II, and after the war, the sheet steel shortages and strikes at vendors that plagued all independents. After the war, for example, Chrysler was held up for weeks just by a strike at the supplier of their door locks. Being a holding company, GM was better to able to weather this situation.
Perhaps the best summation of the Clipper’s design comes from Joel Prescott: “The truth may well be that the Clipper should be remembered as automotive history’s most successful committee design, because assigning the genius of its beautiful lines exclusively to one particular designer cannot now be done with any degree of certainty.” And as it turned out, this new look guaranteed the Clipper an appearance never compromised by competitive imitators. In 1942 Cadillac and Buick adopted the same pontoon fender line, but the Clipper still looked unique, apart from and slightly above the crowd, especially the new '42 senior Clippers, which alone retained the debut '41's 127-inch wheelbase, longer hood and front fenders.
Engineering and evolution
When considering the great transitional designs that brought us from the art decorations and speed-lining age of the Thirties into the envelope bodies of the Forties, much is always made of Bill Mitchell’s famous Cadillac Sixty Special. In particular, its thin window frames, squared-off roof, wider-than-high grille, and concealed running boards were bold steps forward. The Clipper had at least as many pioneering features in an even more integrated package.The original milestone 1941 Clipper rode the senior wheelbase of 127 inches (3,225.8 mm) and used the One Twenty’s 282 CID straight eight, but produced 125 bhp (five more than the One Twenty). Despite the familiar engine, few Clipper parts were interchangeable with other models. The chassis was entirely new: a double-drop frame allowed a lower floor without reducing road clearance. The engine was mounted well forward and the rear shocks were angled to assist the traditional Packard fifth shock in controlling side-sway. The front suspension was entirely new, since the lower frame eliminated the need for Packard’s traditional long torque arms. A double-link connection between the Pitman arm and steering brackets, with a cross bar and idler arm and two cross tubes, controlled wheel movement.
The 1941 Clipper was the widest production car in the industry and first to be wider than it was tall—a foot wider to be exact. The body from cowl to deck was a single piece of steel—largest in the industry, and the floor pan had only one welded seam from end to end. Single pieces of sheet metal comprised the rear quarters and hood. The hood could be lifted from either side of the car or removed entirely by throwing two levers. Instead of the traditional third side window, ventipanes were incorporated in the rear doors, providing controllable flow-through ventilation. The battery made its first move from under the seat to under the hood, where it stayed warmer and was more accessible. There was a “Ventalarm” whistle to warn when the tank was within a gallon of being full, and an accelerator-activated starter button, so the act of starting simultaneously set the automatic choke. Reithard’s beautiful symmetrical dashboard contained a full ration of instruments, including an electric oil pressure gauge adapted from the One Sixty. Options included Packard’s Electromatic clutch, which let the driver ignore the clutch pedal in ordinary driving; "Aerodrive” (overdrive); an effective auxiliary under-seat heater, leather upholstery, fender skirts, and, for $275, air conditioning-- a Packard first, introduced on all eight-cylinder 1940 models.
Introduced in April 1941 as a single four-door sedan model, the Clipper was by no means a cheap or even medium-priced car. It sold for around $1,400, in a market niche between the One Twenty and One Sixty, competing with the Cadillac Sixty-One, Lincoln Zephyr, Buick Roadmaster and Chrysler New Yorker. Despite a late start, it garnered 16,600 model year sales, almost as many as the One Twenty. Clearly, for Packard, it was the wave of the future. By the 1942 model year, Clipper styling had permeated every Packard in the line, except where special tooling existed—convertibles, taxis, wagons and commercial cars. Curiously, however, the market slot occupied by the ’41 Clipper was abandoned, recreating a gap between the Clipper One Twenty Custom ($1.341) and the Clipper One Sixty ($1,688).
The bulk of the 1942 production was concentrated on the 120 inches (3,048 mm) wheelbase junior models, but the One Sixty and One Eighty Clippers proved conclusively that Packard was as much a builder of luxury cars as ever. The 1942 One Sixty sedan, for example, was 9.5 inches (241.3 mm) longer and 140 pounds (63.5 kg) heaver than its square-rigged 1941 predecessor. The One Eighty was wider, almost as long, with more interior width, and with almost as much legroom as the long-wheel-base 1942 One Eighty, which still used the old-style Packard bodywork.
The silky smooth 356 CID straight eight of the One Sixty and One Eighty Clippers, with its 104 pounds (47.2 kg), nine-main-bearing crankshaft and hydraulic valve lifters, was the most powerful engine in the industry through 1947, exceeding Cadillac’s V-8 by 15 hp. It could deliver 70 miles per hour (112.7 km/h) in second gear overdrive and circulate the huge Packard Proving Grounds banked oval track at over 100 mph, marvellous for a 4000 pounds (1,814.4 kg) luxury car in 1942. Its prodigious torque would allow it to walk away from a dead stop . . . in second gear. . . up hill. You could (and Packard did) balance a nickel on the head with the engine idling. It's interesting to note that in 1950, ten years after Packard's nonpareil nine-main-bearing 356 inline 8 debuted, Rolls-Royce echoed it in their nine-mained, F-head 346-ci B-80 inline 8, used only in a handful of Phantom IVs produced solely for heads of state, military vehicles, and Dennis fire trucks. Like Packard's husky 245-ci six used in junior Clippers, Packard's 1940-50 356 Super-8 engine was widely used as a marine engine.
The top of the line Clipper One Eighty offered two shades of leather or six colors of wool broadcloth upholstery, Mosstred carpeting from New York’s Shulton Looms, walnut grained instrument panels, amboyna burl garnish moldings, seatbacks stuffed with down and rear center armrests. Unlike any other contemporary, the post war Custom Super’s headliner was seamed fore to aft instead of sideways. Packard claimed that the unique headliner was adopted “to provide a more spacious feel to the interior.” That these superb luxury cars were built for the classes and not the masses is attested by the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA), which granted “Classic” status to the 1946-47 Super and Custom Super Clipper, among the few postwar cars so recognized, as they are continuations of the 1942 Super-8 One-Sixty and Custom Super-8 One-Eighty Clippers, their postwar names streamlined in keeping with their sleek shape.
With a nearly-full line of Clippers, Packard managed to build 34,000 1942 models before production ceased in February (an annual rate of around 80,000). According to the late John Reinhart, there is no doubt that Clipper styling would have proliferated in 1943-45. “The next logical step would have been convertibles and commercials—and a wagon.” But the war intervened. Whereas Cadillac with its greater facilities was able to field a complete line of restyled ‘42’s including convertibles, all of which came right back in 1946, Packard was able only to add a club coupe body before the war.
The club coupe was a magnificent looking car—the sportiest and rarest Clipper destined to be built. Only about 40 are thought to have been built before production closed down in 1942; a single One Sixty is the only example known to exist. Postwar, scarcely 600 senior coupes came off the production lines, compared to about 6,600 senior sedans as Packard emphasized the more popular four-door body style.
In 1946-47 the numerical designations were dropped and the line consisted of Clipper Sixes and Eights on the 120 inches (3,048 mm) wheelbase and Supers and Custom Supers on the 127 inches (3,225.8 mm) wheelbase. For the first time there were now seven-passenger sedans and limousines, riding a 148 inches (3,759.2 mm) wheelbase. For their type, these “professional Packards” enjoyed excellent success. They compare favorably with Cadillac’s 1946-47 Seventy-five, beating it not only be 15 hp but by a foot of wheelbase, yet selling for about the same $4,500-$5,000. Counting several thousand bare chassis supplied to commercial body manufacturers, the Seventy-five outsold the long wheelbase Clipper; but for finished cars from the factory, production was dead even: about 3,100 cars each for 1946-47 combined.
Postwar
Many economic experts predicted that the end of World War II would bring a severe recession or perhaps even another depression to the United States. They had history on their side because the U.S. did experience a sharp, albeit brief economic downturn after World War I. Perhaps Packard’s management team took these calamitous warnings to heart while planning its postwar strategy. Obviously, if the economy were to take a tumble, it would make sense to push the low-priced Packards—the Clipper Sixes and Eights—rather than the up-market Supers and Custom Supers.The postwar economy, of course, proved the experts wrong. It was so healthy that many materials, notably sheet steel, were in short supply. Workers demanded more money, and so the automakers and their suppliers endured a series of strikes. These factors, of course, strangled production. At the same time, Americans had money jingling in their pockets, and they were willing to spend freely to acquire most anything—especially new cars. Price, it seemed, hardly mattered. Packard thus found itself in a dilemma, whether or not it realized it. On the one hand, the firm couldn’t even begin to produce cars in the numbers it had intended. On the other, the cars it did turn out were mainly the less profitable junior-series models.
Packard management’s chief interest after the war was in the same medium-priced cars that had saved it in the Depression, the Six and junior Eights. The company was still firmly run by President George Christopher, who had helped save it with the One Twenty, and whose most famous remark refers to the luxury Packards as “goddamn senior stuff.” Christopher had junior Clippers in production by October 1945, but it wasn’t until June 1946 that the first Custom Super came down the line. Total Packard production in the first two postwar model years was 82,000, against 91,000 Cadillacs. The difference was that the vast bulk of Packard production was of Clipper Sixes and Eights priced $1,700-2,200. The Cadillacs (except for the fast-diminishing Sixty-one) began around $2,300. Quite obviously, Packard could have built, and sold, almost as many senior Clippers as Cadillac sold Sixty-two’s and Sixty Specials, had Christopher and his team chosen to do so.
Clearly, the long-wheelbase Clippers were competitive with the Cadillac and the low-volume Chrysler Crown Imperial (Lincoln had no long models) in the first two postwar years. Likewise, among owner-driver models, Packard had Cadillac neatly bracketed. The Cadillac Sixty-two sedan and coupe started around $2.300 in 1946—about the same price as the Super Clipper. Against Cadillac’s $3,100 Sixty Special, which came only as a four-door sedan, Packard offered the all-out-luxury Custom Super Clipper sedan or coupe for about the same money, albeit on a slightly shorter wheelbase. While it’s true that the 1946-47 Sixty-two and Sixty Special outsold the Super and Custom Clipper by three to one, contrary to common impression, that was something that Packard could have done something about.
This is a new point which has been missed in the many postmortems of Packard’s fall: that reverting to the status of a producer strictly luxury cars would not have meant downsizing the labor force or contracting the facilities. The market for anything on wheels was bottomless; it didn’t matter whether the car cost $1,800 (Clipper Eight). $2,300 (Clipper Super) or $2,900 (Custom Super). It would have sold. Nor is this a hindsight judgement, since Packard management was capable of seeing this at the time. At the start of postwar car production, Fortune recorded a consensus that “there now exists a market for from 12 to 14 million cars,” and that was in a day when three million or so cars was considered a very good year. “In 1941,” Fortune continued, “The 32 million American families owned 29,600,000 cars . . . As 1946 began, the cars were down to 22 million which is not very far from the danger point (18 million) of a transportation breakdown . . . of this remaining total, at least half are in their last days.” It didn’t take a mystic to comprehend these facts, as the late Hickman Price, Jr., who bought Willow Run for the Kaiser-Frazer partners, once said: “I believed we would have a period of three or four years—I remember putting 1950 as the terminal date in which we can sell everything we can make.”
Almost immediately after production got rolling in 1945, chief stylist John Reinhart was told, much against his judgment, to update the Clipper. If Dutch Darrin had thought Packard loaded “gobs of clay” onto his original model in 1941, what must he have thought of the 1948 models? Furthermore, there was no change in market orientation, still rooted firmly in the medium price field. Indeed in 1948, the final year for President George Christopher, senior Packard production dwindled from 30 percent to 11 percent of total production, trailing Cadillac by tens of thousands. Packards, as a later president, James Nance, stated, “just handed the luxury car market to Cadillac on a silver platter.”
Professional designers have contemplated continuations of the Clipper into 1948-49, with a broader range of body styles including hardtops and convertibles. Their designs were beautiful and would have kept pace with the all-new Cadillacs and Lincolns of 1949, allowing Packard to come back with its first postwar redesign in 1950. But this is the lesser point: the key failure was to reorder the corporation’s priorities and establish it once again as the American luxury car it had been so successfully for forty years.
Hindsight does suggest that Packard lost its battle for survival at this point, although it wouldn’t be evident immediately. Since the company couldn’t achieve high volume, it would have been more logical to maximize the profit from each car it could build. Not only were customers standing in line, but by putting top-of-the-line Packards on the road, the public’s image of Packard as a luxury car builder would have been enhanced. Worse still, the 1948 facelift lost the design continuum the Clipper had so brilliantly offered. These elegant and inimitable lines dating back to the early years of the century, so laboriously maintained by countless Packard designers over the years, almost instantly departed. Though it retained the Clipper’s basic shell, the 1948 model bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Although it was as brilliantly engineered and was as fine a performer as before, the 1948 iteration no longer looked the part of a luxury Packard. The bulbous “up-side-down bathtubs” owed nothing to modernity and never gained much popularity. Market share suffered at a time when Packard should have, and could have become the luxury car leader again. They could have been ahead of the styling curve, not behind it. If the release of the Clipper had been saved until after the war, and if it would have been in a style closer to the one Howard “Dutch” Darrin proposed for the styling team in 1940, Packard would have been in a position of styling leadership and the 1948 “pregnant elephant” Packards could have resembled the “high-line” style released in 1951. The designs of the ’51 cars were on the drawing boards shortly after the war, but instead, Packard management settled for facelifts.
The money spent on the facelifts, John Reinhart and many others always maintained should have gone into an expansion of Clipper body styles to compete with Cadillac. Packard recognized this too late when it brought out a convertible as the first ’48 body style—a model it should have had by 1947 at the latest. Eighteen months later Cadillac was already out with the glamorous Coupe de Ville hardtop, while Packard’s newest model was . . . the Station Sedan.
It was already apparent to some advanced thinkers in 1948 that the future of the car business belonged to the giants. But the strategy would have placed Packard in a much stronger position for a successful merger around 1950-51. At least one independent manufacturer was ready to make that happen; George Mason, President of Nash-Kelvinator. Mason wanted a postwar combination of independents, a fourth player in an automotive Big Four, with Packard as the luxury division.
Yet all independents were doomed. By 1954, there was only a "Big Two," Chrysler's market share falling to 12.9%. All Cadillacs had been downsized for 1936, were effectively junior cars ever since, increasingly sharing components with lesser divisions. For example, a 1941 Cadillac convertible shares every piece of sheet metal with the '41 Pontiac ragtop. Rolls-Royce was principally an aero engine manufacturer since 1935, the cars an increasingly boutique sideline, an "assembled" product cribbing from Buick, Packard, Chrysler, postwar R-Rs and Bentleys having bodies stamped by Pressed Steel of Cowley, who also served much of the rest of British automakers.
Packard failed to groom new management. Despite handsome postwar cash reserves, Packard stuck with their dated, if smooth, dependable, L-head eights through 1954 against a field of ohv V-8s, box office poison in the sellers' market returning in 1949. But by the 1950s these were moot points. No independent could get unit costs and tool amortization down to GM/Ford levels, or afford costly TV advertising and annual model changes. But this is another story—another chapter in the sad decline of what Don Vorderman has called “the car we couldn’t afford to lose.”
1948-1952
The Clipper nameplate was dropped for 1948 as Packard issued its Twenty-Second Series automobiles, which, while proclaimed by the company as "all-new," were actually restyled Clippers. Only the 1941-47 Clipper's roof and trunk lid survived. At this time, Packard's president, George Christopher, insisted upon concentrating on sales of the company's lower-priced cars, while longtime competitor Cadillac focused its attentions on the upper end of the market.The Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Series (from mid-1949) cars wore the "upside-down bathtub" styling that was briefly in vogue in the late 1940s. Unfortunately for Packard, Nash
Nash Motors
Also see: Kelvinator and American Motors CorporationNash Motors was an automobile manufacturer based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the United States from 1916 to 1938. From 1938 to 1954, Nash was the automotive division of the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation...
, Lincoln-Mercury
Lincoln-Mercury
Lincoln–Mercury was a collective name for the Lincoln and Mercury divisions of the Ford Motor Company, whose vehicles were typically sold side-by-side in a single dealership....
, and Hudson
Hudson Motor Car Company
The Hudson Motor Car Company made Hudson and other brand automobiles in Detroit, Michigan, from 1909 to 1954. In 1954, Hudson merged with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation to form American Motors. The Hudson name was continued through the 1957 model year, after which it was dropped.- Company strategy...
, the four manufacturers who embraced this type of styling, General Motors introduced designs that were lower-slung, more tightly-drawn and less bulbous at around the same time. GM's designs quickly caught the buying public's fancy, while the "bathtubs" quickly fell from favor.
Following a round of bitter corporate infighting in 1949, Packard management finally decided to phase out the "bathtubs" and create the all-new Twenty-Fourth Series for 1951. The new "high-pockets" design (so called because of its high beltline) was much more modern. However, Packard continued to push hard into the lower end of the mid-priced field with its new "200" and "250" models, which was dominated at the time by Oldsmobile, DeSoto and others. James J. Nance
James J. Nance
James J. Nance was an American industrialist who became president of Studebaker Packard. Later, he was chief executive of the Central National Bank of Cleveland, chairman of the executive committee of Montgomery Ward and chairman of the board of trustees of Cleveland State University and a major...
became the company's president in 1952, and he immediately set to work on divorcing the lower-priced cars from the higher-end Packards. To this end, he decreed that the 200 and 250 would be consolidated into a new line of Clippers for 1953.
1953-1955
Packard 200
The Packard 200 was an automobile model produced by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan during model years 1951 and 1952. Models in the 200 designation represented the least expensive Packard model range, on the firm's shortest wheelbase, and least powerful 8-cylinder in-line...
, beginning in 1953. Clippers were available in Special and Deluxe trim models, as two and four door sedans. A 1953 Clipper went from 0-60mph in 17.6 seconds in a Popular Mechanics test. The turning circle was 41ft.
For 1954, the "Clipper by Packard" was given its own unique rear fender trim and tail lights to further differentiate it from traditional Packards. The cars were also available with a distinctive two-tone paint pattern. For 1955, Packard became a marque in the newly formed Studebaker-Packard Corporation
Studebaker-Packard Corporation
The Studebaker-Packard Corporation was the entity created by the purchase of the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana, by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, in 1954.Packard acquired Studebaker in the transaction...
. The 1955 Clipper Custom offered torsion-bar suspension something not offered on other models, which only offered coil
Coil spring
A Coil spring, also known as a helical spring, is a mechanical device, which is typically used to store energy and subsequently release it, to absorb shock, or to maintain a force between contacting surfaces...
and leaf spring
Leaf spring
Originally called laminated or carriage spring, a leaf spring is a simple form of spring, commonly used for the suspension in wheeled vehicles...
suspension. It also had a power steering option. Drivers enjoyed the comfortable ride but complained of door rattles and poor workmanship.
The Packard Clipper Constellation was a two-door hardtop automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation
Studebaker-Packard Corporation
The Studebaker-Packard Corporation was the entity created by the purchase of the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana, by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, in 1954.Packard acquired Studebaker in the transaction...
in model years 1955 and 1956. The 1955 model was a Packard
Packard
Packard was an American luxury-type automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, and later by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana...
product and sold as part of the Packard Clipper line; for 1956, Clipper
Clipper (automobile)
Clipper was a stand-alone make of automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in 1955–1956 for the 1956 model year only. Clipper was aimed at the middle price field of American automobiles which included Dodge, Oldsmobile, and Mercury....
split from Packard, becoming its own make.
| Series | Model | Model No. | Body Style | Price (US$) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5540 | Deluxe | 5522 | Touring Sedan | 2,586 |
| 5540 | Super | 5542 | Touring Sedan | 2,686 |
| 5540 | Super Panama | 5547 | Hardtop | 2,776 |
| 5560 | Custom | 5562 | Touring Sedan | 2,926 |
| 5560 | Custom Constellation | 5567 | Hardtop | 3,076 |
A total of 8,039 Clipper Deluxe, 14,995 Super and 15,380 Custom was built during model year 1955.
1956
Model year 1956 finally saw Nance's dream of Clipper as a separate marqueClipper (automobile)
Clipper was a stand-alone make of automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in 1955–1956 for the 1956 model year only. Clipper was aimed at the middle price field of American automobiles which included Dodge, Oldsmobile, and Mercury....
realized, although by this time, most experts would later agree, it was too late. The Clipper
Clipper (automobile)
Clipper was a stand-alone make of automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in 1955–1956 for the 1956 model year only. Clipper was aimed at the middle price field of American automobiles which included Dodge, Oldsmobile, and Mercury....
was now its own separate registered marque, manufactured and sold by the Packard-Clipper Division of Nance's Studebaker-Packard Corporation
Studebaker-Packard Corporation
The Studebaker-Packard Corporation was the entity created by the purchase of the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana, by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, in 1954.Packard acquired Studebaker in the transaction...
.
Existing Packard dealers were required to execute a Clipper dealer franchise sales agreement, but once again, most cried foul and, not long into the model year, "Packard" script emblems began to be placed on the decklids of new Clippers that rolled off the company's Detroit assembly line. In a complete reversal of Nance's strategy, the emblems were also made available for placement on already-built cars that were languishing on dealers' lots across the country.
By the summer of 1956, Studebaker-Packard was in deep financial trouble. The Packards and Clippers were not selling at anywhere near a profitable level, and the company's creditors refused to advance any further money to the company for new tooling that would have allowed Nance to finally realize his ultimate goal of sharing body components among the company's three lines of cars. In late July, the last Packards and Clippers rolled out of the Conner Avenue factory.
1957
Following the closure of the Detroit, MichiganDetroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...
Packard plant, Studebaker-Packard entered into a management contract with the Curtiss-Wright
Curtiss-Wright
The Curtiss-Wright Corporation was the largest aircraft manufacturer in the United States at the end of World War II, but has evolved to largely become a component manufacturer, specializing in actuators, aircraft controls, valves, and metalworking....
Company. Under C-W's president, Roy T. Hurley, S-P's new president Harold Churchill approved production of a new Packard, to be built in Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana
South Bend, Indiana
The city of South Bend is the county seat of St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States, on the St. Joseph River near its southernmost bend, from which it derives its name. As of the 2010 Census, the city had a total of 101,168 residents; its Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 316,663...
plant. The new Packards, originally to continue the Packard Executive
Packard Executive
The Packard Executive was an automobile produced by the Packard-Clipper Division of the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in 1956.The Packard Executive was introduced on March 5, 1956 to fill a perceived price gap between the prestige Packard line and the new Clipper brand, which was in its first year...
nameplate, were to share the Studebaker President
Studebaker President
The Studebaker President was the premier automobile model manufactured by the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana from 1926-1942. The nameplate was reintroduced in 1955 and used until the end of the 1958 model when the name was retired....
four-door sedan body and new four-door station wagon body as well. The total tooling cost of the new Packard was estimated at roughly $1 million. At some point, however, the Executive name was dropped, as all of the Packards produced for 1957 carried the Packard Clipper name.
In order to keep the tooling cost as low as possible, trim components from the 1956 Clippers were used. This was done to make the 1957 model differ in appearance from the President; outside, this included a narrower Packard-style front bumper and 1956 Clipper tail lamps and wheel covers. Inside, the cars' dashboards were fitted with the same basic instrument cluster as used in the previous two years.
Sales of the new Clippers were not great; historians differ as to why, although the cars' obvious Studebaker origins (which led the new Clippers to be derisively nicknamed "Packardbaker
Packardbaker
Packardbaker is a derisive slang term applied to 1957 and 1958 model year Packard automobiles. The word's origin came from detractors of Studebaker-Packard Corporation's attempt to continue the Packard brand with models that were derived from the Studebaker President body shell and running...
s" by many people) certainly didn't help. Only about 4,600 were sold for the year.
For 1958, the Clipper name was discontinued, and the few Packard automobiles that were produced (four-door sedans, station wagons, and two-door hardtop coupes) were simply known by their marque name. The only exception to this was the Packard Hawk
Packard Hawk
The 1958 Packard Hawk was the sportiest of the four Packard-badged Studebakers produced in the final year of Packard production,. Packard's plant in Detroit, Michigan had been leased to Curtiss-Wright , and Packard models in this dying-gasp year were all rebadged and retrimmed Studebaker products...
, which was based on the Studebaker Golden Hawk
Studebaker Golden Hawk
The Studebaker Golden Hawk is a two-door pillarless hardtop coupe type car produced by the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana between 1956 and 1958.-Styling:...
.
What might have been
Had Studebaker-Packard's creditors not cut off the flow of money to the company in early 1956, James Nance and his underlings had some plans for their three lines of cars for 1957 and beyond. However, as time and money slipped away, these plans died without coming to fruition.As planned, Studebaker and Clipper cars would have been built around a shared chassis and inner body structure, but both cars would have had distinctly different outer styling. Photos exist of a proposed Clipper with tailfins, a flat roofline, crisply-drawn lower body features and even slight fins over the headlamps that extended back, flowing seamlessly into the tops of the long front fenders.
All in all, the proposed look was thoroughly modern and would certainly have made an interesting contrast when compared to the bulky, rounded 1957-58 Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile was a brand of American automobile produced for most of its existence by General Motors. It was founded by Ransom E. Olds in 1897. In its 107-year history, it produced 35.2 million cars, including at least 14 million built at its Lansing, Michigan factory...
against which it would have competed. One is led to wonder, however, how the proposed car would have fared in the market given the "Eisenhower recession" that began in late 1957 and extended through much of 1958, when so many other established marques such as Oldsmobile, Buick
Buick
Buick is a premium brand of General Motors . Buick models are sold in the United States, Canada, Mexico, China, Taiwan, and Israel, with China being its largest market. Buick holds the distinction as the oldest active American make...
and DeSoto
DeSoto (automobile)
The DeSoto was a brand of automobile based in the United States, manufactured and marketed by the Chrysler Corporation from 1928 to 1961. The DeSoto logo featured a stylized image of Hernando de Soto...
had a tough time selling cars.