Packard Clipper - Engineering and Evolution

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 (3,200 mm) and used the One Twenty's 282-cubic-inch (4,620 cc) 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 1941 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-inch (3,000 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 (240 mm) longer and 140 pounds (64 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-cubic-inch (5,830 cc) straight eight of the One Sixty and One Eighty Clippers, with its 104-pound (47 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 horsepower (11 kW). It could deliver 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) in second gear overdrive and circulate the huge Packard Proving Grounds banked oval track at over 100 mph, marvellous for a 4,000-pound (1,800 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 1942s, 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-inch (3,000 mm) wheelbase and Supers and Custom Supers on the 127-inch (3,200 mm) wheelbase. For the first time there were now seven-passenger sedans and limousines, riding a 148-inch (3,800 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 horsepower (11 kW) 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.

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 upmarket 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 who would never have struck during the war, now demanded more money, and so the automakers and their suppliers endured a series of costly strikes. These factors, of course, strangled production. At the same time, Americans had money jingling in their pockets, and were willing to spend freely to acquire most anything—especially new cars. Price, it seemed, hardly mattered. Packard was in a dilemma: On one hand, the firm could not produce cars in the numbers intended. On the other, the cars it did turn out were mainly 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. Christopher, a graduate of GM's bucket mill B-O-P (Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac) divisions, had referred to the luxury Packards as "that goddamn senior stuff." Christopher had junior Clippers in production by October 1945, but it was not until June 1946 that the first Super/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. Other than the less popular Series 61 price leader, which replaced the LaSalle for 1941, postwar Cadillacs began around $2,300. Packard could have built and sold as many senior Clippers as Cadillac did Series 62s and 60Specials, had Christopher and his team so chosen.

The long-wheelbase (147-inch) Clipper seven-passenger sedan and limousine were competitive with 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 more sumptuously trimmed Custom Super Clipper sedan or coupe for about the same money. The 1946–47 Cadillac Series 62 and 60Special outsold the concurrent Packard Super and Custom Super Clipper three to one, simply because George Christopher board chose to focus on building junior models, which accounted for 80% of Packard's postwar production. This is a new point which has been missed in the many postmortems of Packard's fall: Reverting to strictly luxury cars would not have meant downsizing the labor force or contracting the facilities. The market for anything on wheels was bottomless; it did not 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 did not 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 hideously bulboid 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 20 percent to 11 percent of total production, trailing Cadillac by tens of thousands. Packard, as a later president, James Nance, stated, "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 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 would not be evident immediately. Since the company could not achieve GM volume, it would have been smarter to extract more profit from each car it built. 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. The elegant, inimitable lines dating back to the early years of the century, so laboriously maintained by Packard designers over the years, vanished. Though it retained the Clipper's basic shell, the 1948 model bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Although it was as well 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 been in a style closer to that Dutch Darrin proposed in 1940, Packard would have been in a position of styling leadership. The 1948 "pregnant elephant" Packards instead might have resembled the "high-pockets" style released in 1951. The designs of the 1951 cars were on the drawing boards shortly after the war, but instead, Packard management settled for a costly, ill-fated facelift of the svelte 1941–47 Clipper. The money spent on the facelift, as John Reinhart and others 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 1948 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 porky Station Sedan.

By 1948 it was clear that the future of the car business belonged to the giants. 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 1941 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 straight 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."