The Jet, Hudson’s fast track to oblivion!
By, Murray D. Stahl (03-2009)
This is a sad story full of unintended consequences. We all know that consequences could be good or bad. The good, when Pfizer stumbled upon Viagra while searching for a blood pressure medication; bad, well a Pontiac Aztec. Everyone had good intentions hence the unintended part. In the case of the Hudson Jet there were many people that tried hard to improve the new product until there were so many disparate design elements that the resulting mish-mash formed a cute little car that appealed only to the Hudson true believers and didn’t advance the brand. That being said I like the Jet for its quirkiness; it somehow appeals in the way an original VW bug looked cute enough to make you forget its inherent ugliness. Some out of the mainstream cars were a success, think Studebaker Starlight coupe, Citron 2CV, Nash Metropolitan or Jeep Wrangler, others like the Jeepster, Willy’s Aero, AMC Pacer and the Bantam failed. It’s interesting to note that almost all of these “different” designs were offered by the small Independents searching for a niche while hiding from the big three. The little companies were forced into assuming more risk as they searched forever-smaller niches neglected by the major manufacturers. Alas, for many reasons the Hudson Jet didn’t tickle enough buyers fancy to save Hudson, here is its story.
The tale of the Hudson Motor Car Company's 1953-54 Jet compact is one of the saddest in all of automotive history. The annals of automotive failure are replete with four-wheel Greek tragedies. There are hundreds of tales of pathetically under engineered and terminally unreliable vehicles that failed due to their own inherent vices and flaws. The Hudson Jet is not one of these, its final visual design may have been unfortunate but it was a quality effort launched into the marketplace with few mechanical bugs and a tank like body structure.
It was superbly engineered as a unibody, very avant-guard for its time. The body structure was bank vault solid with doors that shut with a reassuring Packard like thunk. The inside passenger cabin was roomy and comfy with a number of upscale features and appointments. The little car offered very adequate performance surprising many of its contemporaries.
I personally recall a standard shift Hudson Jet running away from my buddies new 55 Chevy, automatic with Power-pack. The 265 Chevy V8 made a lot more noise with its split manifold duel exhaust setup but was no match for the hoary old flathead six in the Jet. The Dual carburetor, twin H option greatly enhanced the easy breathing flathead. I can’t say it better than the Road Test Report of Motor-Life in April 1953.“The new Hudson Jet can best be described as the performance surprise of the year. This latest entry into the low-priced field combines the utility of the family sedan with the handling characteristics and roadability of a European sports tourer. And the acceleration and top speed of the Jet will astonish all who drive it. Its performance during the road test was so spectacular for a car of its relatively small displacement that the testing equipment was subjected to several checks to verify the accuracy of the results. However, when the quiet engine is started and the transmission engaged, one thing is immediately apparent - this is truly a hot car, to be handled with care.”
The test car was equipped with the 114 bhp engine which gets its 10 hp boost over the stock from the optional equipment mentioned (Twin-H power). In theory, the 202 cubic inch engine, smaller than the Ford V-8, Chevrolet or Plymouth would not seem to be adequate in output to handle the automatic transmission. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Using Lo range on the transmission, the Jet will spin its rear wheels on macadam and lurch out in the best drag strip tradition. Driving through traffic in fourth gear, a kick-down into third will pin the driver to the seat while a slight twitch of the steering wheel will jump the car into a clear lane. The center point steering is very firm; practically no road shock is apparent at normal speeds over pitted roads. The car will smother any bump, go over grade crossing tracks with only the whisper of a rumble (and the test car was not undercoated) and come out of a dip without pitching or rocking.”
Road and Track magazine was no less complementary in their Road Test Review:
"Our approach to the new Hudson Jet was one of mild interest - perhaps even condescension. When we completed the road test our general opinion was completely reversed. No fair minded driver can give this car a trial without coming to a definite set of favorable conclusions for here is a scrappy little car that is going to give both the big 3 (Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth) and the little 3 (Henry J, Rambler and Willys) some real competition."
"For a car featuring 'step-down' design, we thought 7 inches more overall height than a Studebaker hardly justifies calling this a low car. On the other hand, the seats are very comfortable and visibility is excellent."
The Jet was a failed effort with Performance, comfort and quite decent economy even by modern standards. In order to understand the Hudson Jet’s performance, especially in the acceleration tests, you have to consider the relation of its power to weight, it enjoyed the highest power-to-weight ratio (1 to 24.8) of any car in the low-price field. That, plus the 8-to-1 compression ratio, is the reason why this 114 hp car could hit 97 mph and why it does so well in the zero to 60MPH 11.99 seconds with a standard transmission. The Super Jet's engine simply had to lug around proportionately less weight than many other cars.
It should have been enough, the car had no serious flaws but creating it without a cohesive design vision effectively sealed the fate of the Hudson Motor Company as an independent company.
The senior Hudson Hornet and Wasp models had been designed in 1948 and sales were slowing fast. The highly praised, innovative “step-down” styling that allowed a lower profile in 1948 looked old and stogy by 1952. Hudson management had a small bucket of cash and could use it to develop a new “senior” line of full size cars or copy the path that Nash (AMC) had taken and concentrate their resources on a small car enterprise. There was risk in either case for a smallish company like Hudson. In the end they decided to pretty much bet the company on the development of a small car. Like Nash with their rambler development in 1950 they analyzed the reality of the marketplace and determined that the small, quality automobile niche was about the only tidbit the big companies had left on the table. Once the basic small car route was determined they would realize that a small car could utilize their existing 6 cylinder designs; since they had little cash to develop a new engine that was probably the clinching argument for a small car program.
The automotive world was fast changing in the early fifties. Both Cadillac and Oldsmobile had robust new V8s and the customer base was all a-twitter over the bragging rights that owning this “new” technology afforded. In the driveway bragging sweepstakes nobody’s Dad was touting the old L-head, side valve engines designed decades ago.
Hudson fancied themselves as direct competitors to Oldsmobile but just couldn’t muster the financial resources to develop their own V-8 or even a proprietary automatic transmission. Going the “clean sheet of paper route to a smaller, quality car avoided the nasty decisions inherent in redesign of their large cars. In theory the new Jet would sell well and throw off enough cash to afford a redo for the senior car lineup. This was essentially a Hail-Mary pass with all their chips on the table.
As all the world knows, costs frequently overrun; the $12 million dollar development program became $16 million and debt levels soared. During the development stage rumor had it that Hudson was putting step-down principles into a lighter car. When produced, the Jet's basic suspension and chassis features were similar to the bigger Hudson’s of 1948 design. Suspension is by coil springs at the front and leaf springs at back. Tubular shocks are used all around and Jets set on a 105-inch wheelbase. The big Hudson’s “step-down” designs made it look lower while the production Jet just looked high and stubby.
The story of the Jet had began with the success of the Nash Rambler. All by itself it had created the first successful American compact in 1950. Beginning as a well-equipped little convertible that was suitably cute and quirky it defined a different track than stripping a full size car to market a cheaper alternative. Packard and Studebaker went the route of simply marketing essentially cheapened models of their “big” cars but were finding that this made their senior lines less exclusive and dimmed desire. The successful businessman buying a senior Packard just didn’t appreciate seeing one of his salesmen showing off his “starter” Packard. The cheaper “big car” route greatly sapped sales from the senior lines. Rambler had started with a unique little convertible but the line had soon broadened into everything from coupes to station wagons. Nash had found a very comfortable niche in the small car market and was selling them as fast as they could make them.
Hudson had thus determined to create a brand new, “clean sheet of paper” small car design but in the classic unintended consequences mode simply allowed too many disparate opinions spoil the effort. Hudson President Edward Barit had decided that his company would try to get in on the compact market that Nash seemed to be doing so well in. The new car would be built on a 105-inch wheelbase, and use a small-bore, high-compression version of the venerable L-head six. Hudson's talented chief stylist Frank Spring came up with a smooth, low-slung design reminiscent of the contemporary Mercedes Ponton sedan. Due to the involvement of dealers and senior management the pretty Frank Spring design wasn’t built. The car put into production was kind of in the middle between cute-ugly like a PT-Cruiser and the unrelenting ugliness of the Aztec. They were surely guilty of suborning design malpractice.
President Barit insisted that the new car have "chair-high" seating and enough headroom to wear a Stetson hat while driving. This stretched the design in the vertical dimension. Then the management meddling got worse. Mr. Barit invited Hudson's biggest dealer, a Mr. Jim Moran of Chicago, to consult on the design of the new car. Mr. Moran sold an incredible 3,000 cars a year, 5% of Hudson's total output, and so he was someone that Hudson probably needed to pay attention to. In and of itself, consulting a major dealer on design issues is not a bad idea. The dealer, if he's any good, might know a thing or two about what customers are looking for.
Unfortunately, Mr. Moran's suggestions were based, not on what Hudson customers might have wanted, but on what Mr. Moran personally wanted. Mr. Moran's tastes were, shall we say, a bit out of the mainstream. Like Mr. Barit, he liked high seating and hats and high rooflines. He also liked Oldsmobile tail lights and the curved backlight of the full-sized 1952 Ford cars.
Thanks to the meddling of management and their cronies the Jet’s original graceful design was ruined. They ended up with a high fender line, a high roof line, tail lights that looked like an afterthought, and a rear window styled for a much bigger car. Pittsburgh Plate & Glass was able to supply back windows of the proper width to Hudson, but only if it used the exact same curvature as the Ford window, the Ford was a wider car. The finished car was either too tall for its length and width, or too short and narrow for its height, depending on how you look at life.
The "Bullhead-mouth" grille with turned down edges made it look a little unhappy, as though it knew it wasn't going to win the beauty contest and had only just realized it perhaps shouldn't have entered in the first place. It’s of note to realize that tastes have changed; the new Mini for 09 has a close to identical, sad little turned down mouth grille and it’s successful.
If you look closely at Jet photos you'll note that there's a crease running along the side below the door handles. On the fancier Jets, it's set off with a chrome strip. Legend has it that Frank Spring worked that crease into the final styling to demarcate where his original fender line would have been had the guys in the fedoras not messed with the design. The original design was elegant and this story might have had a happier ending if Hudson Management had realized that design wasn’t their strong suit.
Viewing the Jet from the perspective of a half-century later, it's perhaps a little hard for us to appreciate just how "off" its proportions looked in 1952. Picture, if you will, one of the more attractive "three-box" compact sedans you see on the road today. Now, imagine it next to a Chevrolet Aveo or Scion. The Aveo appears a little too tall, a little too narrow, and comes off looking very dorky by comparison; yet these contemporary ugly ducklings are popular. Not so in 1953 as the automotive market was galloping into an era of high style and horsepower. The major companies were moving into a two-year styling cycle while simultaneously packing on the state of the art mechanical bits. With hindsight we can see that the independents simply couldn’t pedal fast enough to keep up. Expensive developments like engines weren’t the end all they became in the fifties when everyone wanted their new car to be bigger, better and faster than last years. The automotive market had been stable for years allowing a decent engine design to soldier on for decades with only incremental changes. Ford, Chevy and Plymouth engines in 1953 were all well over 20 years old. This design stability afforded companies like Hudson, Packard, Studebaker and the others breathing room; they could exist as long as the major companies didn’t push expensive, new technologies too fast.
Like most postwar Hudsons, the Jet used unibody construction that Hudson called “Monobuilt.” It was solid, yet relatively lightweight. The high-compression engine (available with the "Twin H" induction system) gave it excellent acceleration (12 seconds 0-60, at a time when 20+ seconds was considered average), and the handling and braking were equally worthy. It got 24 MPG when cruising at a steady 50 MPH. Fit and finish and interior appointments were up to Hudson's usual high standards. Other than its odd proportions, it was a car that had absolutely nothing wrong with it except for price, that is.
Hudson subcontracted out the fabrication of the Jet unibodies to Murray Products. Hudson didn't have the cash to pay the tooling costs up front, so the tooling was financed by adding an amortization charge to the price of each Jet body furnished to Hudson. This, and other expenses, along with Hudson's inability to take advantage of economies of scale the way the bigger firms could, drove the price of the Jet a little too far down the demand curve for its own good. A 1953 Hudson Jet in base trim with no options cost $1,858. In comparison, a base-model full-sized Chevrolet 150 cost only $1,670. For about the price of stripped-down no-frills no-options Hudson Jet, you could get a top-of-the-line Chevy Bel-Air, a Ford Customline V-8 4-door sedan, or a Studebaker Lowey coupe.
In the 1953 model year, Hudson sold 21,143 Jets. In 1952, Hudson had sold 70,000 or so cars and made $8 million in profit. In 1953, it sold 66,000 total cars and, thanks to the Jet's development costs, lost $10 million. In 1954, it got worse: sales of Jets slid to 14,224, and Hudson lost another $6.2 million through April 30th putting it on pace for an $18 million loss in the calendar year. With about 35,000 total Jets sold at around $1,800 each, Hudson’s cost was about $45K for each Jet.
I can imagine the consternation in the boardroom at Hudson as they realized that they were caught in a confluence of unfavorable market forces and unfortunate decisions. Trend graphs would be distributed showing decreasing sales, mounting debt load and loss of manufacturing scale. The end was near for the proud, old company and it was very visible.
These losses were so devastating that Hudson was more or less forced to merge with Nash or go completely bankrupt. The two manufacturers joined to form American Motors on May 1, 1954. One of the first things AMC's board did after the merger was to discontinue the Jet as it directly competed with their Rambler and was selling so poorly as to be an asterisk in the marketing plan.
So, then, it is entirely fair to say that the Jet brought about the end of Hudson as an independent automaker. It was a perfectly good little car, but Hudson could not get the price down to where it needed to be to succeed in the marketplace. When management stuck their big thumbs in the designer’s pie the resulting awkward looking car simply couldn’t attract enough sales to reach any kind of economy of scale; they were doomed. The car was a solid, high quality effort that just didn’t sell.
What makes the story even sadder is to consider the opportunity cost of the Jet. It cost Hudson $16 million to bring the Jet to market. (That's about $130 million in today's dollars.) That $16 million could have been used to develop modern overhead-valve engines and freshen the styling of the full-size Hudson’s. Hudson was an established, high quality, player in the mid-priced, full-sized car market. While there's no way to know for certain, it's probable that a restyled Hornet with a modern V-8 would have sold much better than the ill-fated Jet but would only postpone the end. All the smallish, Independent companies faced the same reality, their costs weren’t competitive. A famous study in 1953 showed that the Studebaker Lowey coupe could have been produced by Chevrolet and sold profitably at 27% under what Studebaker had to charge.
There's a history in the US of troubled companies developing trend setting new cars just as they are failing as a business. The list of trendy, milestone cars devised during a companies dying gasp is long and a few that come to mind are the Stutz Bearcat, Coffin-nose Cord and Dusenberg SJ. In the more recent past we see the Packard Caribbean, Studebaker Avanti and the Hawk GTs. I sincerely hope that the new Cadillac STR and the Corvette ZR1 won’t end up on the last gasp list, as GM flounders, but it’ll be a close thing. The Jet wasn’t a milestone by any measure but it was a progeny of the Falcon and Valiants to come.
As for the Jet itself, in 2009, it doesn't look nearly as awkward as it did in 1953. It looks like just another old car, a little smaller than most. To the extent it's sort of homely, it's homely in an endearing way. Its problems weren't really its fault, it had a good heart under that dorky exterior, and it deserved a better fate than it got. In any event the Jet is an interesting part of fifties history as a last gasp effort of a great company.
Oh yes, they were raced, sometimes not successfully as in the photo. Surprisingly enough, all photos shown in this article were taken off of the Studebaker Drivers club Forum.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
A straightforward look at taxes
I don't often post anything even mildly political but this seems to be so on point that I could'nt resist.
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A straightforward look at taxes from an Accounting Professor at South Dakota UniversityHow Taxes Work....Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing;
The fifth would pay $1;
The sixth would pay $3;
The seventh $7;
The eighth $12;
The ninth $18;
and the tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
That's what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement-until one day, the owner threw them a curve (in tax language, a Tax Cut).Since you are all such good customers, he said, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. So now, dinner will only cost $80.00.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.The first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free.But what about the other six-the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share?
The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, Then the fifth man (who was paying $1) and the sixth man (who was paying $3) would end up being PAID to eat their meal.
So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percentage amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.And so the fifth man now paid nothing;
The sixth pitched in $2;
The seventh paid $5;
The eighth paid $9;
The ninth paid $12 Leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59.Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. I only got a dollar out of the $20, declared the sixth man, but he, (pointing to the tenth) got $7.00.Yeah, that's right, exclaimed the fifth man, I only saved a dollar, too, ........It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!That's true! Shouted the seventh man, why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!Wait a minute, yelled the first four men in unison, We didn't get anything at all.
The system exploits the poor!So, the nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late, what was very important. The bill for dinner was still $80.00 and they were now FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill! Imagine that!And that, boys and girls, journalists, college instructors and prospective officeholders, is how the tax system works.
The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy (see: European Tax Exiles), and they just may not show up at the table anymore. Where would that leave the rest?Unfortunately, most taxing authorities anywhere cannot seem to grasp this rather straightforward logic!
T. DaviesProfessor of Accounting & Chair,Division of Accounting and Business LawThe University of South DakotaSchool of Business414 E. Clark StreetVermillion, SD 57069
I don't often post anything even mildly political but this seems to be so on point that I could'nt resist.
================================================
A straightforward look at taxes from an Accounting Professor at South Dakota UniversityHow Taxes Work....Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing;
The fifth would pay $1;
The sixth would pay $3;
The seventh $7;
The eighth $12;
The ninth $18;
and the tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
That's what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement-until one day, the owner threw them a curve (in tax language, a Tax Cut).Since you are all such good customers, he said, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. So now, dinner will only cost $80.00.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.The first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free.But what about the other six-the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share?
The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, Then the fifth man (who was paying $1) and the sixth man (who was paying $3) would end up being PAID to eat their meal.
So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percentage amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.And so the fifth man now paid nothing;
The sixth pitched in $2;
The seventh paid $5;
The eighth paid $9;
The ninth paid $12 Leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59.Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. I only got a dollar out of the $20, declared the sixth man, but he, (pointing to the tenth) got $7.00.Yeah, that's right, exclaimed the fifth man, I only saved a dollar, too, ........It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!That's true! Shouted the seventh man, why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!Wait a minute, yelled the first four men in unison, We didn't get anything at all.
The system exploits the poor!So, the nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late, what was very important. The bill for dinner was still $80.00 and they were now FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill! Imagine that!And that, boys and girls, journalists, college instructors and prospective officeholders, is how the tax system works.
The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy (see: European Tax Exiles), and they just may not show up at the table anymore. Where would that leave the rest?Unfortunately, most taxing authorities anywhere cannot seem to grasp this rather straightforward logic!
T. DaviesProfessor of Accounting & Chair,Division of Accounting and Business LawThe University of South DakotaSchool of Business414 E. Clark StreetVermillion, SD 57069
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Government Pork
When reading through this list of crap we can't afford I was reminded of the famous quote of R. Reagan's, "when you start paying people to be poor, be assurred that you'll have a lot of poor people." It's simply sad.
Check out Harry Reid territory.... 167 million for city hall and 300 million for arts center ...Hello
WOW !!! They say there are no earmarks or pork barreling in the spending bill. Pick you state and town and see who is kidding who ??
<http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_state>http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_stateFind projects by state or territory
Check out Harry Reid territory.... 167 million for city hall and 300 million for arts center ...Hello
WOW !!! They say there are no earmarks or pork barreling in the spending bill. Pick you state and town and see who is kidding who ??
<http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_state>http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_stateFind projects by state or territory
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Automobiles and Intellectual capital
By, Murray D. Stahl (02-2009)
It’s now quite fashionable to disparage the products manufactured by the American automobile companies. We hear it from friends and families on a regular basis. In some areas of the country twenty-something kids have never driven an American car. By that I don’t mean a Toyota assembled in South Carolina. No, I mean a car that was conceived, designed and built in the US by a company that is headquartered in the US.
In the fifties GM, Ford and Chrysler enjoyed gigantic market shares; GMs share alone approached 60%. Alas, after the Harley Earl and Alfred P. Sloan era a confluence of corporate mistakes led them to the pitiful state they are in today. The mixture of shortsighted (Ok stupid) management, unions that think profit is a dirty word and Government intervention in the design process created a can’t-win situation.
So here we are with another major industry about to collapse. The automakers are following all the other industries we’ve lost as our Manufacturing base shrinks. We no longer manufacture any state of the art electronic products, TVs, cameras or most appliances. At best we assemble components made overseas.
The worst part of the rapid decline of our manufacturing base is the loss of Intellectual Capital. This capital is what fuels innovation and could foster a resurgence of manufacturing in the US. For many years countries like India and China lamented their “brain drain” that occurred as they sent their best and brightest to the US for university then found that they stayed because the prospects in the US were just better. Just start noting how many Physicians and businessmen you see that are immigrants. In the past few years that has reversed as prospects in their home country improve. The majority of foreign students obtaining advanced degrees in the US now return home and that trend is accelerating. If you’re skilled at designing innovative new products why settle in a country that no longer values manufacturing.
One has to Consider that an automobile has upwards of 14,000 parts without even considering the myriad of small sub-parts making up a larger component; I.E. levers and springs in the window mechanism, bolts and nut on the starter. It is arguably the most costly, complex product ever put into mass production; it’s manufacturing creates many complex engineering, design and timing problems even beyond its huge overhead structure and marginal returns.
All these parts have to be engineered, priced, tooled and planned out to a cost and time budget. Tool and die shops, electronic gismo manufacturing and steel companies are dependant industries providing good jobs that require thought. These are highly skilled jobs that contribute enormously to the national economy. Innovative new products are the only way to grow an economy and it takes brains to innovate. India, China and Japan each graduate many times more engineers than we do although we graduate more Attorneys than any other country by far. We can easily be the worlds leader at parsing inane legal safety messages, I.E. “Hot Coffee”, warning, may be hot,” to put on coffee cups. Alas, the market for that silly prose is all ours.
I don’t pretend to know the answer nor do the Pooh-Bahs in the puzzle palace in Washington. I do know that GM and Ford now do almost all their mechanical and design work at their overseas plants. Most of the snazzy new stuff on sale sit on platforms designed in Germany, Sweden or Australia. As more of the Intellectual component of the new product work is done outside the US the chance of a bright American High school graduate picking a vocation in what seems a dying job pool get slimmer. Our purchasing decisions are now driving our decline. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explored the possibility that GM would be very profitable in just a few short years after they pulled all their manufacturing out of the Union states they seem trapped in. They are expanding their plants overseas as we speak. Were on a precipice with no short term answer
Of course our kids will be able to learn new language skills. They surely will have to master the phrase, “do you want fries with that,” in Japanese.
The all new cars from GM and Ford are world class vehicles and I think there is a very slim chance that a combination of Union “give-backs” and legislative action will save them. The toxic blend of restrictive work rules, costs for Cadillac health care, taxes, legislative meddling and an uninspired management have finally taken them down. It’s really simple; all the foreign automakers are non-union, ergo no restrictive work rules, the plant management actually runs the plant. On health care; all our automotive competition enjoys Government sponsored health care usually financed by a Value added Tax. The tax paid by their automakers is refunded when the product is exported. The US is the only major country that taxes corporate profits directly. As for management problems please read the postscript. We need the US automakers to prosper but survival isn’t for sure.
Postscript:
Sprinkled throughout this article there are references to how dominant a position GM enjoyed in the fifties; alas they squandered the Alfred P. Sloan legacy with a long series of politically astute but product stupid managers. Their recent malfeasance has taken one of the preeminent industrial enterprises in history to the brink of bankruptcy. I only outline a few of GMs sins because I’m most aware of them. All of the US companies made major design and quality decisions that they can’t be proud of. To quote some MBA speak; the results formed an adverse feedback loop. The translation of this jargon is, “they don’t like our stuff.”
Just a few of their proud moments on the downside:
----The Oldsmobile Gasoline V-8 engine converted to diesel fiasco.
----The multi-displacement 2-4-6-8 engine that worked for a week.
----The Vega engine that self destructed with any 20-degree temperature swing while the car itself rusted fast enough to be visible.
----The Chevette, a car designed to rid our shores of the asian competition. It had a life span similar to a fruit fly.
----The Corvair; a good car ignored by the marketplace, perhaps too innovative for the time.
----The Cadillac Cimarron; this car marked the point when even the most passive and incurious American finally woke up and said, “ are you ****ing kidding me?” A prestige nameplate slapped on a cheap rental car design does not make a great car; it makes a catastrophe.
----The Bloated 1991 Caprice with curves in all the wrong places. The idea seemed to be to build something so appallingly unappealing that not even the elderly would buy it. State Troopers were embarrassed to be seen in it.
----All the look alike sedans of the era that had interiors that taxicab companies would be ashamed of.
----The deletion of convertibles in the 70s since no one would ever want one.
----A maroon automobile paint that faded in 6 months but continued in GM use for 5 years!
----The height of incompetence was the Aztec, a final insult to a people long erased from human history. GM affixed their name to this repugnant gallimaufry of discordant design elements ranging from art deco to Power Ranger. This seemed to be GMs low point. The Aztec took GM from Harley Earl’s soaring Styling exercises to a car whose name now symbolizes the ugly, dysfunctional design of any product.
After the Aztec low point GM must have re-read their management books for their newer designs for Cadillac, Corvette and Malibu are on the mark; now they only have to convince the buying public that they have reformed and will sin no more. I hope they get a chance to survive as US based companies for my Grandkids sake.
By, Murray D. Stahl (02-2009)
It’s now quite fashionable to disparage the products manufactured by the American automobile companies. We hear it from friends and families on a regular basis. In some areas of the country twenty-something kids have never driven an American car. By that I don’t mean a Toyota assembled in South Carolina. No, I mean a car that was conceived, designed and built in the US by a company that is headquartered in the US.
In the fifties GM, Ford and Chrysler enjoyed gigantic market shares; GMs share alone approached 60%. Alas, after the Harley Earl and Alfred P. Sloan era a confluence of corporate mistakes led them to the pitiful state they are in today. The mixture of shortsighted (Ok stupid) management, unions that think profit is a dirty word and Government intervention in the design process created a can’t-win situation.
So here we are with another major industry about to collapse. The automakers are following all the other industries we’ve lost as our Manufacturing base shrinks. We no longer manufacture any state of the art electronic products, TVs, cameras or most appliances. At best we assemble components made overseas.
The worst part of the rapid decline of our manufacturing base is the loss of Intellectual Capital. This capital is what fuels innovation and could foster a resurgence of manufacturing in the US. For many years countries like India and China lamented their “brain drain” that occurred as they sent their best and brightest to the US for university then found that they stayed because the prospects in the US were just better. Just start noting how many Physicians and businessmen you see that are immigrants. In the past few years that has reversed as prospects in their home country improve. The majority of foreign students obtaining advanced degrees in the US now return home and that trend is accelerating. If you’re skilled at designing innovative new products why settle in a country that no longer values manufacturing.
One has to Consider that an automobile has upwards of 14,000 parts without even considering the myriad of small sub-parts making up a larger component; I.E. levers and springs in the window mechanism, bolts and nut on the starter. It is arguably the most costly, complex product ever put into mass production; it’s manufacturing creates many complex engineering, design and timing problems even beyond its huge overhead structure and marginal returns.
All these parts have to be engineered, priced, tooled and planned out to a cost and time budget. Tool and die shops, electronic gismo manufacturing and steel companies are dependant industries providing good jobs that require thought. These are highly skilled jobs that contribute enormously to the national economy. Innovative new products are the only way to grow an economy and it takes brains to innovate. India, China and Japan each graduate many times more engineers than we do although we graduate more Attorneys than any other country by far. We can easily be the worlds leader at parsing inane legal safety messages, I.E. “Hot Coffee”, warning, may be hot,” to put on coffee cups. Alas, the market for that silly prose is all ours.
I don’t pretend to know the answer nor do the Pooh-Bahs in the puzzle palace in Washington. I do know that GM and Ford now do almost all their mechanical and design work at their overseas plants. Most of the snazzy new stuff on sale sit on platforms designed in Germany, Sweden or Australia. As more of the Intellectual component of the new product work is done outside the US the chance of a bright American High school graduate picking a vocation in what seems a dying job pool get slimmer. Our purchasing decisions are now driving our decline. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explored the possibility that GM would be very profitable in just a few short years after they pulled all their manufacturing out of the Union states they seem trapped in. They are expanding their plants overseas as we speak. Were on a precipice with no short term answer
Of course our kids will be able to learn new language skills. They surely will have to master the phrase, “do you want fries with that,” in Japanese.
The all new cars from GM and Ford are world class vehicles and I think there is a very slim chance that a combination of Union “give-backs” and legislative action will save them. The toxic blend of restrictive work rules, costs for Cadillac health care, taxes, legislative meddling and an uninspired management have finally taken them down. It’s really simple; all the foreign automakers are non-union, ergo no restrictive work rules, the plant management actually runs the plant. On health care; all our automotive competition enjoys Government sponsored health care usually financed by a Value added Tax. The tax paid by their automakers is refunded when the product is exported. The US is the only major country that taxes corporate profits directly. As for management problems please read the postscript. We need the US automakers to prosper but survival isn’t for sure.
Postscript:
Sprinkled throughout this article there are references to how dominant a position GM enjoyed in the fifties; alas they squandered the Alfred P. Sloan legacy with a long series of politically astute but product stupid managers. Their recent malfeasance has taken one of the preeminent industrial enterprises in history to the brink of bankruptcy. I only outline a few of GMs sins because I’m most aware of them. All of the US companies made major design and quality decisions that they can’t be proud of. To quote some MBA speak; the results formed an adverse feedback loop. The translation of this jargon is, “they don’t like our stuff.”
Just a few of their proud moments on the downside:
----The Oldsmobile Gasoline V-8 engine converted to diesel fiasco.
----The multi-displacement 2-4-6-8 engine that worked for a week.
----The Vega engine that self destructed with any 20-degree temperature swing while the car itself rusted fast enough to be visible.
----The Chevette, a car designed to rid our shores of the asian competition. It had a life span similar to a fruit fly.
----The Corvair; a good car ignored by the marketplace, perhaps too innovative for the time.
----The Cadillac Cimarron; this car marked the point when even the most passive and incurious American finally woke up and said, “ are you ****ing kidding me?” A prestige nameplate slapped on a cheap rental car design does not make a great car; it makes a catastrophe.
----The Bloated 1991 Caprice with curves in all the wrong places. The idea seemed to be to build something so appallingly unappealing that not even the elderly would buy it. State Troopers were embarrassed to be seen in it.
----All the look alike sedans of the era that had interiors that taxicab companies would be ashamed of.
----The deletion of convertibles in the 70s since no one would ever want one.
----A maroon automobile paint that faded in 6 months but continued in GM use for 5 years!
----The height of incompetence was the Aztec, a final insult to a people long erased from human history. GM affixed their name to this repugnant gallimaufry of discordant design elements ranging from art deco to Power Ranger. This seemed to be GMs low point. The Aztec took GM from Harley Earl’s soaring Styling exercises to a car whose name now symbolizes the ugly, dysfunctional design of any product.
After the Aztec low point GM must have re-read their management books for their newer designs for Cadillac, Corvette and Malibu are on the mark; now they only have to convince the buying public that they have reformed and will sin no more. I hope they get a chance to survive as US based companies for my Grandkids sake.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Wonderful, non-Studebaker historical video
A simply fasinating movie from the days when we used to make things in this country. If your feeling a bit nostalgic for the old days just consider the job of the guy installing spokes all day--day after day!!!! In any event I think this is one of the best videos of the early automotive period. Turn up the sound.
Neat old video.......
Click on the link below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4KrIMZpwCY
Neat old video.......
Click on the link below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4KrIMZpwCY
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Studebaker’s New V-8
Triumph and tragedy, An Independent Automobile Company’s quest to survive a change in it’s reality.
By: Murray D. Stahl
(Proud Owner of a Studebaker Speedster ) A version of this article with photos is available on my website at: http://sites.google.com/site/studebakergoodstuff/
In 1951 the Cadillac and Oldsmobile overhead valve V-8s were barely two years old. The handwriting was on the wall; an automobile company could only prosper with a modern overhead valve V-8 engine. Studebaker had been contemplating a V-8 for years. In fact after the war the new “coming or going” Studes had frames designed to accept a front or rear mounted power plant either V-8 or pancake 6. (D) (E)
It doesn’t take too much of a leap of faith to surmise that Studebaker began thinking of a V-8 as a marketing advantage right around 1948. It had to be a wakeup call when the upstart Kaiser-Frazer outsold Studebaker for a few months in 48-49 even though Studebaker sported a newly designed body style.
It was during this period that Kaiser had a dedicated team working on a V-8 headed by Paul Bastian with Harold Bullard and David Potter. They were far along on the design when the plug was pulled due to poor cash flow. It’s known that Mr. Potter presented his ideas to Studebaker. Today we would call the use of good designs found in various competitors engines “best practices” and there is no doubt that Studebaker built a stout V-8 design by picking and choosing from those best ideas. (K) (G)
Even then the Independents were fighting over a dwindling piece of the market share pie. (K) Studebaker probably saw a large portion of those K-F sales as coming out of their totals. The post-war market where you could sell anything you built was ending and all the independent automobile companies were faced with the same problem, succinctly analyzed by Bill Williams in a 1973 Special Interest Autos article:
“It costs as much for a small company to retool a new car as it does a big one. Chevy or Ford though can amortize that tooling over, say, a million cars while a company like K-F is lucky to produce a tenth of that. Now it’s true that it costs less to tool for a 100,000 car run than for a million car run but not enough less to make the lower run competitive.
Similarly, it costs K-F exactly the same to buy a one-page ad in Life as it did one of the big three. Again (they) could spread this per-car ad cost over perhaps a million cars, so for each car the ad costs, lets say one cent. But for a 100,000 car run that same ad cost K-F ten cents per car.”
The same daunting cost threshold faced Studebaker and all of the other independents. It’s not documented but it seems reasonable to assume that Studebaker was well aware of this cost-disadvantage versus the big three and saw their salvation as being a bolder kind of full line manufacturer. This would certainly explain their very bold, controversial and often-beautiful post-war car designs. It also fostered thrift; the 1953 bumpers were still being used during Studebaker’s end game in the mid-sixties; Chevy had 9 specific bumpers in the same period. They pioneered sliding roof designs and championed the use of Superchargers. The age old question, “Does adversity foster innovation and Excellence” comes to mind. There's no doubt they put themselves into an untenable position by not addressing the fact that their overall costs per vehicle were much higher than their competitors. High labor cost, sliding sales and an inefficient manufacturing plant constituted a perfect storm. High cost equaled low sales and profits that severely constricted funds for redesign or innovation. This circle of problems eventually doomed Studebaker even though their design talent fought bravely to break out of it. Studebaker's break-even point was hovering around 282,000 vehicles sold in a year.
Studebaker was a “full-line” Automobile producer with a miniscule market share. Their competitors enjoyed market shares as high as 55% while theirs was 4% at its high-point in 1950, sinking fast from there to well under 1% in 1954. I suppose Studebaker management could have thought that they could overcome their inherent, structural disadvantages and become a large enough company to survive and prosper but that only shows a triumph of hope over reality.
As the new V-8 was introduced Studebaker management was congratulating themselves on 1950 sales of 334,554 vehicles. It was a high water mark. Soon the company would be hanging on by their proverbial fingernails selling 82,000 cars, 113,920 vehicles in 54. A 66% drop in three years despite a “state of the art” engine and redesigned automobiles. The new engine was a triumph hitting all its design and quality benchmarks but it could not be the silver bullet Studebaker needed. In my opinion their basic business model was faulty.
For Studebaker to market a V-8 in 1951 was a remarkable achievement. Little Studebaker was the only independent to market a V-8 prior to1955, and even this great little engine was designed before anyone realized what a big deal the horsepower race was going to be. A case can be made that Hudson and Kaiser failed due to the lack of a “Modern” V-8. (K) Packard was late to the V-8 party and it certainly contributed to their demise. Nash, aka American Motors lengthened their life and shined themselves up for a sale with their own V-8.
The new engine offered more power and the additional benefit of greater economy as well. In the Mobilgas Economy Run of 1951 a V-8-powered Commander with overdrive managed a 28-mpg average from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon via Death Valley. That beat the 1950 L-head Six Commander's mileage by more than four miles per gallon. As you look at the EPA figures for our modern full size cars take note of how few can match this fuel economy 50 plus years later.
Korean war restrictions and an abbreviated model year due to labor problems meant Studebaker couldn't approach its 1950 sales record. Production in 51 dropped to 268,565 cars, but V-8 Commander sales were a far greater proportion of overall sales than previously: In 1950 Commander sales were just 21 percent of sales, while in 1951 they more than doubled to 46 percent of the total. Thanks to this sales success, plus war production making trucks for the use of the military Studebaker rolled into 1952, it’s centennial, looking proud and strong due in no small extent to the new V-8.
The first Studebaker V-8 started out at a modest 120HP; four years later they gained 46% more power to 185HP on the 55 Speedster. This was accomplished without raising the compression ratio; they did it by tweaking their over-square engine design, slightly expanding the bore, shortening the stroke. Adding a four-barrel Carburetor and split manifold exhaust. (D) An analysis shows that a typical long stroke engines pistons travel 40-odd miles up and down for every 100 miles of automobile travel. In a modern short-stroke engine like the new Studebaker each piston will cover only 29 miles over the same distance. (H) Everything else being equal the less distance a piston travels, the less wear it generates.
When the stroke is shortened the incoming air-fuel mixture has a good deal less velocity through the valve ports; that lengthens valve life and reduces engine noise. In 1955 the little engine that could went from 232 Cubic inch displacement to 259 and boasted a better power to weight ratio than any US automobile save the Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe. It would eventually reach it’s zenith at 289 cubic inches. (H) (E) (J)
The application of forged cranks, rods and pistons along with the high alloy cast blocks promised durability not usual in a low priced car. The use of timing gears instead of chains cost more but assured trouble free, high mileage engines. The designed in full pressure oiling gave the engine state of the art lubrication. “All Studebaker blocks were seasoned; they were cast and painted to inhibit rust then set outside for two cold South Bend winters.” (C) This allowed the block to pre-stress before machining. It was this “seasoning” that held their crankshaft and cylinder bores true, free of stress and was a major reason for high mileage longevity. It was a very unusual practice in all but high-end vehicle engines.
(B) (C)
Hop-up magazine in their 1953 manual of new engines by Gene Jaderquist said that the new Studebaker V-8 so closely follows the Cadillac V-8 in it’s general design and appearance that with the valve covers removed only an expert could tell them apart. All the outside dimensions are within 3/8 inch of each other and the intake manifolds are interchangeable. The valving is similar but for a ¼ inch extra length on the Studebaker. On the Studebaker their rod and main bearing area exceeded the Cadillac by 22% and the little Studebaker V-8 made .515 HP per cube to the Caddy’s .484. (A) Studebaker was the only early adopter of a
V-8 to use solid lifters. With a modified cam they reached 7000RPM in testing with these lifters. (O)
Studebaker had hoped to reduce cost by shortening the engine footprint, which would allow a shorter and lighter car. They were successful; the V-8 powered car came in at 215 pounds lighter and 10 inches shorter than the six cylinders it replaced. Due to the extraordinary cost of developing a new engine from scratch and tooling it for production the design had to allow for the near certainty of much higher Compression and higher cylinder pressures. Their design gave the new engine a lower end tough enough to handle any loads the foreseeable future would likely demand. (B)
Studebaker engineers had planned for compression increases by securing each cylinder Head with 18 bolts; six bolts surrounded each cylinder. This allowed for extraordinary head sealing that virtually eliminated Cylinder head leakage even when subject to the pounding of a supercharger or turbine. To put it in perspective; “late model Mopar, Ford small block and Y-blocks have 10 head bolts, a Buick V-6 (stage ll) has 14.” The very durable, long-lived, Chevy small block V-8 has 17 bolts to Studebaker’s 18. (E)
A small engine to start and it stayed small but only the Chrysler, using a very expensive to build hemispherical head technology, produced more HP per cubic inch. (E)
The trend in fifties engine design was to thin wall casting however Studebaker once again took a different path. They elected to go with a heavy wall casting that would accept large overbores. Few automobile manufactures could boast a possible .187-inch overbore. Even with that enormous overage the castings piston walls remained about as thick as a Chevy V-8 thin-wall block at standard. (C)
In a fit of hyperbole, Tom McCahill, the dean of auto test drivers called the little engine fitted to a relatively light body “nitroglycerine stuff.” Perhaps he was just peering into the future. The little mouse-motor began life as a 120HP weakling but grew to a 335HP production engine by the end of its life. (L) A definite tribute to the robust design. Even Consumer Reports when road testing the new engine praised it for running “quietly and smoothly.” It’s unusual that they praised an engine during this era. (N)
The new 1951 Studebaker V-8 had a built in durability beyond its rather bland, early vitals:
Type: OHV V-8, Seasoned iron block, iron headsDisplacement: 232.6 cubic inchesBore x stroke: 3.38 x 3.25
Solid Lifter valve train
18 Bolt Heads, 6 bolts/cylinder
Forged crank, rods and pistons
Chromed piston ringsCompression ratio: 7.0:1Horsepower @ rpm: 120 @ 4,000Torque @ rpm: 190-lbs.ft. @ 2,000Fuel delivered through a Single Stromberg two-barrel downdraft carburetor
The US automotive industry in 1951 sold 5,338,435 new cars, including the 1000 millionth. Most models were 'carry-overs' from 1950 with the customary annual facelifts. Only Kaiser-Frazer and Packard's 1951 models were entirely new. Ford and Plymouth introduced their first hardtops in a catch-up effort to match the GM hardtop convertible coup. Hardtops had become very desirable fashionably resembling convertible coupes except that the tops were metal and could not be folded down.
The little Studebaker V-8 came to market during these most difficult years for America's independent auto manufacturers. While the biggest problem was most likely Henry Ford II glutting the market with new cars in a vain effort to catch and pass Chevrolet. The Ford sales blitz put enormous pressure on the smaller companies unable to absorb large losses to sell cars. The old proverb, “when elephants dance the mice tremble, comes to mind. Another problem was the market's embrace of the V-8 engine, which required costly tooling and design changes beyond the capacity of most of the smaller automakers. Studebaker was the first independent to come out with a V-8 and even this great little engine was designed before anyone realized what a big deal the horsepower race was going to be. (F)
Proud Moments at the birth of their V-8
In the end this small, century old company showed great daring when it bought out the very first OHV V-8 made by an independent automaker. The proof of their determination was the high quality design for their new V-8. This was quickly born out as the new engine found it’s way into 1951 Commanders. There was only a single, small recall and total warrantee costs were appreciably lower than the decades old six it replaced. A very early spate of cam failures was quickly addressed and did not dim customer confidence.
Photo taken at the Studebaker International meet held in September 2008 at Lancaster Pa. by author
The innovative, lets try anything, spirit Studebaker fostered sometimes veered off course. Borg Warner made Studebaker automatic transmissions and along with Studebaker designed a mechanical power steering unit. It was powered through a belt and featured a series of clutches. (M) While touted as simpler than every other manufacturers hydraulic power steering it was discontinued mid-year 1953. The real world found it very noisy and impossibly complex. Road tests late into the model year still talked about it’s unavailability so it seems it only wasted design funds, not warrantee problems. It was very close to still-born. (O) To my eye it looks complex to the point of a parody of a simple design.
Once GM had dropped their small block V-8 bomb into the automobile marketplace the hoary old long stroke, low power flat-head engines everyone had in their sale brochures looked old fashioned and no amount of innovative styling risk could change that perception.
Back in the day carmakers reveled in different; why in 1930 the Cadillac division alone made a V-8 a V12 and a V16. Customer choices abounded. By 1950 General Motors was offering customers the choice of a flathead six or eight cylinder car (Pontiac); an overhead valve six (Chevrolet & GMC), an overhead valve V-8 (Cadillac & Olds), an overhead valve straight eight (Buick) and all kinds of permutations of 2, 3 or 4 speed automatic transmissions. That’s five dramatically different engine designs just at GM. Ford countered with a flathead V-8 or flathead four along with a late arrival overhead valve six. Chrysler hid their head in the sand, completely ignoring any V-8 or overhead valve configuration until 1951. They had done very well with essentially the same flathead six and eight cylinder engines for 25 years. Chrysler also hedged their bet with a semi-automatic transmission that retained a clutch pedal like it was a security blanket in a Charlie Brown cartoon. The marketplace had punished Chrysler in the thirties for an innovative and bold body design and they only seemed to shed the fear of failure with the Hemi developed concurrently with the Studebaker V-8.
These were only the major companies; independents like Packard had marketed wonderful straight, flathead sixes, eights, V12s and V16s. The Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg consortium flirted with front wheel drive and manufactured engines that are still usually considered works of art. Franklin made great air-cooled engines for their expensive cars long after conventional wisdom deemed them too noisy and suitable only for lawn mowers. Crosley and Chevrolet briefly sold “copper” engines that had a lifespan about the same duration as a fruit fly’s.
In an era when drivers routinely tinkered and repaired their vehicles people were fiercely loyal to cars and engines they were familiar with. Once you mastered a flathead the prospect of working on an overhead valve engine was daunting. Change is scary. You could peg people as “Chevy” or “Ford” guys. To my Dad anyone admitting to being a “Studebaker” guy was as far out there as a quarterback wearing a dress. He was an “Olds” guy but willing to humor friends loyal to other makes as long as they were GM makes. When my older brother opened a British sports car dealership it was like finding out his kid was a commie. In those days car ownership was like joining a religious sect except that you could argue about it and argue they did.
It was into this difficult environment that Studebaker blew into the market with its own overhead valve V-8 in 1951. The new engine displaced a diminutive 232 cubic inches while pumping out 120 horsepower. The relatively lightweight Studebaker bodies allowed this V-8 to climb quite high on the performance charts for 1951 with acceleration and top speed figures close to the Oldsmobile 88. The year preceding the new V-8 was very mixed; industry production at 8 million set a record while Studebaker production at some 334,500 units was up 9.7%. Despite the increase in sales profits only rose 1% as Studebaker settled their labor dispute with a contract that would forever haunt them. (F) Whenever revenues rise by 10% while profits only eke out a 1% increase the differential poses a problem. A case can be made that this was the start of Studebaker’s demise. Studebaker's break-even point fluttered around 282,000 vehicles sold in one year. Soon the company would be hanging on by their proverbial fingernails, selling 113,920 total vehicles in 1954. It got worse when 30% of Studebaker's big dealer network abandoned them by 1956. By 1956 sales had cratered to only 85,401 cars, by 1958 it was only 79,301 vehicles. The grim reaper could be clearly seen silhouetted on the horizon. (F) The new engine placed Studebaker in a more competitive position than the other independents but it alone could not negate their horrid cost situation and the botched launch of the new design in 1953.
The Olds and Cadillac V-8 had started an avalanche. One by one, almost every other American manufacturer brought out its own OHV V-8 engine; Chrysler and Studebaker in 1951; Lincoln in 1952; Buick and Dodge in 1953; Ford and Mercury in 1954; Chevrolet, Pontiac, Plymouth, and Packard in 1955; and even AMC in 1956. Each of those engines had its own peculiarities, but they were all in the mold of the Oldsmobile and Caddy V-8. The overhead-valve V-8 would dominate the American industry well into the 1980s, resulting in some staggeringly powerful engines whose output has only recently been surpassed.
So here it was, Studebaker had their V-8 and had just signed on to produce a line of low, swoopy, clearly gorgeous coupes in 1953 that would forever be called, “Loewy coupes”. The designers had viewed this car as a low production kind of “halo” car. It seemed that no thought had been given to just how it would look as a higher more truncated sedan. It looked small and unusual and sold poorly. One of the basic facts of automotive life is that designers love working on convertibles, coupes and sports cars; it’s up to the adult supervision to bring them back to reality. The four door family sedan was the cash cow of all “full line” automobile manufactures; it remains a mystery how the mesmering glow of the pretty coupe design had made Studebaker management lose sight of that basic business fact. A sampling of road test, new model introduction articles showed almost no interest in the sedan, they seem to be rarely even mentioned. (P) (O) (Q) They wanted an innovative, bold design to yank them from their sales doldrums but instead they piled on another layer of problems. As Stated by H.L. Mencken, “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
By 1954 they had stumbled into a merger agreement with Packard that closely resembled two drowning men reaching for a single life preserver. As they merged both companies were losing fearful amounts of money struggling with disappearing sales, obsolete plants and a high cost structure.
In my opinion Studebaker’s demise could have been predicted and avoided by a more intuitive management in the early fifties. In 1950 they had money, a shiny new V-8 ready for launch and many choices for a new car design. They chose the path to continue as a “full Line” manufacturer. They were the only independent with a full line of trucks and heavy defense work. Given that, it should have been possible for management to look into the future a bit and see that the defense work would wane, the competitors could compound “economies of scale” and their labor costs were outrageous. Insight into the future to plan and react is the definition of good management. Others usually handle the day-to-day operational decisions; foresight is what management is paid for and this is where Studebaker stumbled badly.
With our benefit of hindsight we can fantasize that an early move into a high-quality, niche player situation may very well have worked. Porsche, Aston Martin, Morgan and even Avanti Motors come to mind. The key would have been recognizing the confluence of problems they would face early on. As Charles Darwin famously stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to Change.”
I can visualize (Ok dream) of a Studebaker company in the fifties that actually analyzed it’s situation and realized that it had very rarely exceeded it’s breakeven point in revenue from vehicles excluding the military business. Since 1941 an almost constant level of military vehicle contracts had propped it up. Could they possibly have thought they would always get the contracts? In my dream they decide to become a high-quality, low volume niche manufacturer, it would require them to shed truck, sedans and most of their unwieldy dealer network. It would be difficult but so was trying to market the awkward conversion of the Lowey coupe to a four-door sedan. The Avanti, Hawks and Speedster showed their design expertise was greatest in specialty, essentially niche automobiles. A breakeven point of 40 to 60 thousand highly styled, high quality autos would seem doable while an every two year cycle of complete redesign of a full product line on dwindling revenues proved to be “a bridge to far” for them. There was that brief window when they had the money. Porsche with their 911, Leyland with the Mini and the seemingly timeless Avanti show that a great design, if properly exploited, remains viable far into the future. The key seems to be “design character” that is able to transcend time. It doesn’t have to be a high-end vehicle, it just has to be true to it’s intended use. The Volkswagen beetle was designed as a high-quality, inexpensive and extremely durable automobile. It was produced virtually unchanged for many decades and became a legend. On the other side of the spectrum sits the Porsche 911; a costly, high-quality, state of the art piece of rolling art that proves that if form follows function then design continuity works. Porsche and Volkswagen didn’t tinker with the original purpose of the vehicle, enhancements were complementary to the original theme be it performance or thrift. The Gran Turismo was a wonderful effort but came to market well after the buying public had tired of the many years of Studebaker struggles. I wonder what would have been had a Sherwood Egbert and Brooks Stevens surfaced early on. They seem to have “got it.”
It’s fantasy but remember the Avanti soldered on for 30 plus years despite chronic under funding. The new V-8 was sorely needed but it certainly couldn’t solve all of Studebaker’s problems.
As this is written it appears that our remaining US auto manufacturers have fallen behind their peers in cost control and innovation forgetting the history of their own industry. The buying public in its group Knowledge is able to discern what is the better product. A sales salvation isn’t possible without having the better product. Its very sad that our current Automobile manufactures have lost sight of how to provide the overall value that their customers demand (R)
The final days of Studebaker saw some wonderful car designs created on budgets that wouldn’t fund a door handle design at GM. The Speedster, Hawks, Lark, Gran Turismo and Avanti were tributes to what I think were the best designers in Detroit. They consistently updated the aged designs and produced many timeless and distinctly different cars. Everything they worked on was based on a design at least 13 years old.
The little V-8 was able to run at 147.36 MPH for 50 Kilometers. The Supercharged Stude V-8 set 72 new USAC records IN 1962 including 118.33 MPH for 500 kilometers and a top speed of 153.48 MPH. Heady stuff for a lark. (F) (D)
Studebaker failed, as most companies do, from management failure compounded by a lack of understanding of the company’s situation. In their death throes they created milestone designs that turn heads today. The failure of Studebaker is constantly reviewed because of the recognition of what could have been. A management with vision could have made them into a niche contender, an icon. In 2008, many decades since the doors closed, the Studebaker Drivers Club (SDC) is the largest and one of the most active single Marquee clubs. That’s a great tribute to their design skill and just plane pluck.
Sources:
(A) 1953 Hop-up magazine manual of New Engines by Eugene Jaderquist and Griff Borgeesen
(B) The Studebaker V-8 engine; a presentation by E.J. Hardig, T.A. Scherger and S.W. Sparrow at the SAE Summer meting on 6-7-1951
(C) Engine Report, Studebaker V-8 by Classic Auto Restorer, February, 1997
(D) Total performance Independents by Richard Datson
(E) Studebaker Extreme Duty Engine Book by Richard Datson, (1995 edition)
(F) Studebaker, the complete history by Patrick Foster
(G) Road Test Comments on the McCulloch Supercharger, Motor Life, August 1955 article on Supercharged Speedster
(H) Popular Science, November, 1954
(J) Special Interest Autos, SIA #51, June 1979
(K) The last onslaught on Detroit by Richard M. Langworth
(L) Ultimate American Engine Data by Motorbooks
(M) Speed Age, April 1953, America’s First Motor racing Magazine
(N) Consumer Reports, March, 1955
(O) Speed Age, September, 1953
(P) Fortune Magazine, Automobile Topics, February 1953
(Q) Popular Science, February 1953
(R) The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Triumph and tragedy, An Independent Automobile Company’s quest to survive a change in it’s reality.
By: Murray D. Stahl
(Proud Owner of a Studebaker Speedster ) A version of this article with photos is available on my website at: http://sites.google.com/site/studebakergoodstuff/
In 1951 the Cadillac and Oldsmobile overhead valve V-8s were barely two years old. The handwriting was on the wall; an automobile company could only prosper with a modern overhead valve V-8 engine. Studebaker had been contemplating a V-8 for years. In fact after the war the new “coming or going” Studes had frames designed to accept a front or rear mounted power plant either V-8 or pancake 6. (D) (E)
It doesn’t take too much of a leap of faith to surmise that Studebaker began thinking of a V-8 as a marketing advantage right around 1948. It had to be a wakeup call when the upstart Kaiser-Frazer outsold Studebaker for a few months in 48-49 even though Studebaker sported a newly designed body style.
It was during this period that Kaiser had a dedicated team working on a V-8 headed by Paul Bastian with Harold Bullard and David Potter. They were far along on the design when the plug was pulled due to poor cash flow. It’s known that Mr. Potter presented his ideas to Studebaker. Today we would call the use of good designs found in various competitors engines “best practices” and there is no doubt that Studebaker built a stout V-8 design by picking and choosing from those best ideas. (K) (G)
Even then the Independents were fighting over a dwindling piece of the market share pie. (K) Studebaker probably saw a large portion of those K-F sales as coming out of their totals. The post-war market where you could sell anything you built was ending and all the independent automobile companies were faced with the same problem, succinctly analyzed by Bill Williams in a 1973 Special Interest Autos article:
“It costs as much for a small company to retool a new car as it does a big one. Chevy or Ford though can amortize that tooling over, say, a million cars while a company like K-F is lucky to produce a tenth of that. Now it’s true that it costs less to tool for a 100,000 car run than for a million car run but not enough less to make the lower run competitive.
Similarly, it costs K-F exactly the same to buy a one-page ad in Life as it did one of the big three. Again (they) could spread this per-car ad cost over perhaps a million cars, so for each car the ad costs, lets say one cent. But for a 100,000 car run that same ad cost K-F ten cents per car.”
The same daunting cost threshold faced Studebaker and all of the other independents. It’s not documented but it seems reasonable to assume that Studebaker was well aware of this cost-disadvantage versus the big three and saw their salvation as being a bolder kind of full line manufacturer. This would certainly explain their very bold, controversial and often-beautiful post-war car designs. It also fostered thrift; the 1953 bumpers were still being used during Studebaker’s end game in the mid-sixties; Chevy had 9 specific bumpers in the same period. They pioneered sliding roof designs and championed the use of Superchargers. The age old question, “Does adversity foster innovation and Excellence” comes to mind. There's no doubt they put themselves into an untenable position by not addressing the fact that their overall costs per vehicle were much higher than their competitors. High labor cost, sliding sales and an inefficient manufacturing plant constituted a perfect storm. High cost equaled low sales and profits that severely constricted funds for redesign or innovation. This circle of problems eventually doomed Studebaker even though their design talent fought bravely to break out of it. Studebaker's break-even point was hovering around 282,000 vehicles sold in a year.
Studebaker was a “full-line” Automobile producer with a miniscule market share. Their competitors enjoyed market shares as high as 55% while theirs was 4% at its high-point in 1950, sinking fast from there to well under 1% in 1954. I suppose Studebaker management could have thought that they could overcome their inherent, structural disadvantages and become a large enough company to survive and prosper but that only shows a triumph of hope over reality.
As the new V-8 was introduced Studebaker management was congratulating themselves on 1950 sales of 334,554 vehicles. It was a high water mark. Soon the company would be hanging on by their proverbial fingernails selling 82,000 cars, 113,920 vehicles in 54. A 66% drop in three years despite a “state of the art” engine and redesigned automobiles. The new engine was a triumph hitting all its design and quality benchmarks but it could not be the silver bullet Studebaker needed. In my opinion their basic business model was faulty.
For Studebaker to market a V-8 in 1951 was a remarkable achievement. Little Studebaker was the only independent to market a V-8 prior to1955, and even this great little engine was designed before anyone realized what a big deal the horsepower race was going to be. A case can be made that Hudson and Kaiser failed due to the lack of a “Modern” V-8. (K) Packard was late to the V-8 party and it certainly contributed to their demise. Nash, aka American Motors lengthened their life and shined themselves up for a sale with their own V-8.
The new engine offered more power and the additional benefit of greater economy as well. In the Mobilgas Economy Run of 1951 a V-8-powered Commander with overdrive managed a 28-mpg average from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon via Death Valley. That beat the 1950 L-head Six Commander's mileage by more than four miles per gallon. As you look at the EPA figures for our modern full size cars take note of how few can match this fuel economy 50 plus years later.
Korean war restrictions and an abbreviated model year due to labor problems meant Studebaker couldn't approach its 1950 sales record. Production in 51 dropped to 268,565 cars, but V-8 Commander sales were a far greater proportion of overall sales than previously: In 1950 Commander sales were just 21 percent of sales, while in 1951 they more than doubled to 46 percent of the total. Thanks to this sales success, plus war production making trucks for the use of the military Studebaker rolled into 1952, it’s centennial, looking proud and strong due in no small extent to the new V-8.
The first Studebaker V-8 started out at a modest 120HP; four years later they gained 46% more power to 185HP on the 55 Speedster. This was accomplished without raising the compression ratio; they did it by tweaking their over-square engine design, slightly expanding the bore, shortening the stroke. Adding a four-barrel Carburetor and split manifold exhaust. (D) An analysis shows that a typical long stroke engines pistons travel 40-odd miles up and down for every 100 miles of automobile travel. In a modern short-stroke engine like the new Studebaker each piston will cover only 29 miles over the same distance. (H) Everything else being equal the less distance a piston travels, the less wear it generates.
When the stroke is shortened the incoming air-fuel mixture has a good deal less velocity through the valve ports; that lengthens valve life and reduces engine noise. In 1955 the little engine that could went from 232 Cubic inch displacement to 259 and boasted a better power to weight ratio than any US automobile save the Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe. It would eventually reach it’s zenith at 289 cubic inches. (H) (E) (J)
The application of forged cranks, rods and pistons along with the high alloy cast blocks promised durability not usual in a low priced car. The use of timing gears instead of chains cost more but assured trouble free, high mileage engines. The designed in full pressure oiling gave the engine state of the art lubrication. “All Studebaker blocks were seasoned; they were cast and painted to inhibit rust then set outside for two cold South Bend winters.” (C) This allowed the block to pre-stress before machining. It was this “seasoning” that held their crankshaft and cylinder bores true, free of stress and was a major reason for high mileage longevity. It was a very unusual practice in all but high-end vehicle engines.
(B) (C)
Hop-up magazine in their 1953 manual of new engines by Gene Jaderquist said that the new Studebaker V-8 so closely follows the Cadillac V-8 in it’s general design and appearance that with the valve covers removed only an expert could tell them apart. All the outside dimensions are within 3/8 inch of each other and the intake manifolds are interchangeable. The valving is similar but for a ¼ inch extra length on the Studebaker. On the Studebaker their rod and main bearing area exceeded the Cadillac by 22% and the little Studebaker V-8 made .515 HP per cube to the Caddy’s .484. (A) Studebaker was the only early adopter of a
V-8 to use solid lifters. With a modified cam they reached 7000RPM in testing with these lifters. (O)
Studebaker had hoped to reduce cost by shortening the engine footprint, which would allow a shorter and lighter car. They were successful; the V-8 powered car came in at 215 pounds lighter and 10 inches shorter than the six cylinders it replaced. Due to the extraordinary cost of developing a new engine from scratch and tooling it for production the design had to allow for the near certainty of much higher Compression and higher cylinder pressures. Their design gave the new engine a lower end tough enough to handle any loads the foreseeable future would likely demand. (B)
Studebaker engineers had planned for compression increases by securing each cylinder Head with 18 bolts; six bolts surrounded each cylinder. This allowed for extraordinary head sealing that virtually eliminated Cylinder head leakage even when subject to the pounding of a supercharger or turbine. To put it in perspective; “late model Mopar, Ford small block and Y-blocks have 10 head bolts, a Buick V-6 (stage ll) has 14.” The very durable, long-lived, Chevy small block V-8 has 17 bolts to Studebaker’s 18. (E)
A small engine to start and it stayed small but only the Chrysler, using a very expensive to build hemispherical head technology, produced more HP per cubic inch. (E)
The trend in fifties engine design was to thin wall casting however Studebaker once again took a different path. They elected to go with a heavy wall casting that would accept large overbores. Few automobile manufactures could boast a possible .187-inch overbore. Even with that enormous overage the castings piston walls remained about as thick as a Chevy V-8 thin-wall block at standard. (C)
In a fit of hyperbole, Tom McCahill, the dean of auto test drivers called the little engine fitted to a relatively light body “nitroglycerine stuff.” Perhaps he was just peering into the future. The little mouse-motor began life as a 120HP weakling but grew to a 335HP production engine by the end of its life. (L) A definite tribute to the robust design. Even Consumer Reports when road testing the new engine praised it for running “quietly and smoothly.” It’s unusual that they praised an engine during this era. (N)
The new 1951 Studebaker V-8 had a built in durability beyond its rather bland, early vitals:
Type: OHV V-8, Seasoned iron block, iron headsDisplacement: 232.6 cubic inchesBore x stroke: 3.38 x 3.25
Solid Lifter valve train
18 Bolt Heads, 6 bolts/cylinder
Forged crank, rods and pistons
Chromed piston ringsCompression ratio: 7.0:1Horsepower @ rpm: 120 @ 4,000Torque @ rpm: 190-lbs.ft. @ 2,000Fuel delivered through a Single Stromberg two-barrel downdraft carburetor
The US automotive industry in 1951 sold 5,338,435 new cars, including the 1000 millionth. Most models were 'carry-overs' from 1950 with the customary annual facelifts. Only Kaiser-Frazer and Packard's 1951 models were entirely new. Ford and Plymouth introduced their first hardtops in a catch-up effort to match the GM hardtop convertible coup. Hardtops had become very desirable fashionably resembling convertible coupes except that the tops were metal and could not be folded down.
The little Studebaker V-8 came to market during these most difficult years for America's independent auto manufacturers. While the biggest problem was most likely Henry Ford II glutting the market with new cars in a vain effort to catch and pass Chevrolet. The Ford sales blitz put enormous pressure on the smaller companies unable to absorb large losses to sell cars. The old proverb, “when elephants dance the mice tremble, comes to mind. Another problem was the market's embrace of the V-8 engine, which required costly tooling and design changes beyond the capacity of most of the smaller automakers. Studebaker was the first independent to come out with a V-8 and even this great little engine was designed before anyone realized what a big deal the horsepower race was going to be. (F)
Proud Moments at the birth of their V-8
In the end this small, century old company showed great daring when it bought out the very first OHV V-8 made by an independent automaker. The proof of their determination was the high quality design for their new V-8. This was quickly born out as the new engine found it’s way into 1951 Commanders. There was only a single, small recall and total warrantee costs were appreciably lower than the decades old six it replaced. A very early spate of cam failures was quickly addressed and did not dim customer confidence.
Photo taken at the Studebaker International meet held in September 2008 at Lancaster Pa. by author
The innovative, lets try anything, spirit Studebaker fostered sometimes veered off course. Borg Warner made Studebaker automatic transmissions and along with Studebaker designed a mechanical power steering unit. It was powered through a belt and featured a series of clutches. (M) While touted as simpler than every other manufacturers hydraulic power steering it was discontinued mid-year 1953. The real world found it very noisy and impossibly complex. Road tests late into the model year still talked about it’s unavailability so it seems it only wasted design funds, not warrantee problems. It was very close to still-born. (O) To my eye it looks complex to the point of a parody of a simple design.
Once GM had dropped their small block V-8 bomb into the automobile marketplace the hoary old long stroke, low power flat-head engines everyone had in their sale brochures looked old fashioned and no amount of innovative styling risk could change that perception.
Back in the day carmakers reveled in different; why in 1930 the Cadillac division alone made a V-8 a V12 and a V16. Customer choices abounded. By 1950 General Motors was offering customers the choice of a flathead six or eight cylinder car (Pontiac); an overhead valve six (Chevrolet & GMC), an overhead valve V-8 (Cadillac & Olds), an overhead valve straight eight (Buick) and all kinds of permutations of 2, 3 or 4 speed automatic transmissions. That’s five dramatically different engine designs just at GM. Ford countered with a flathead V-8 or flathead four along with a late arrival overhead valve six. Chrysler hid their head in the sand, completely ignoring any V-8 or overhead valve configuration until 1951. They had done very well with essentially the same flathead six and eight cylinder engines for 25 years. Chrysler also hedged their bet with a semi-automatic transmission that retained a clutch pedal like it was a security blanket in a Charlie Brown cartoon. The marketplace had punished Chrysler in the thirties for an innovative and bold body design and they only seemed to shed the fear of failure with the Hemi developed concurrently with the Studebaker V-8.
These were only the major companies; independents like Packard had marketed wonderful straight, flathead sixes, eights, V12s and V16s. The Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg consortium flirted with front wheel drive and manufactured engines that are still usually considered works of art. Franklin made great air-cooled engines for their expensive cars long after conventional wisdom deemed them too noisy and suitable only for lawn mowers. Crosley and Chevrolet briefly sold “copper” engines that had a lifespan about the same duration as a fruit fly’s.
In an era when drivers routinely tinkered and repaired their vehicles people were fiercely loyal to cars and engines they were familiar with. Once you mastered a flathead the prospect of working on an overhead valve engine was daunting. Change is scary. You could peg people as “Chevy” or “Ford” guys. To my Dad anyone admitting to being a “Studebaker” guy was as far out there as a quarterback wearing a dress. He was an “Olds” guy but willing to humor friends loyal to other makes as long as they were GM makes. When my older brother opened a British sports car dealership it was like finding out his kid was a commie. In those days car ownership was like joining a religious sect except that you could argue about it and argue they did.
It was into this difficult environment that Studebaker blew into the market with its own overhead valve V-8 in 1951. The new engine displaced a diminutive 232 cubic inches while pumping out 120 horsepower. The relatively lightweight Studebaker bodies allowed this V-8 to climb quite high on the performance charts for 1951 with acceleration and top speed figures close to the Oldsmobile 88. The year preceding the new V-8 was very mixed; industry production at 8 million set a record while Studebaker production at some 334,500 units was up 9.7%. Despite the increase in sales profits only rose 1% as Studebaker settled their labor dispute with a contract that would forever haunt them. (F) Whenever revenues rise by 10% while profits only eke out a 1% increase the differential poses a problem. A case can be made that this was the start of Studebaker’s demise. Studebaker's break-even point fluttered around 282,000 vehicles sold in one year. Soon the company would be hanging on by their proverbial fingernails, selling 113,920 total vehicles in 1954. It got worse when 30% of Studebaker's big dealer network abandoned them by 1956. By 1956 sales had cratered to only 85,401 cars, by 1958 it was only 79,301 vehicles. The grim reaper could be clearly seen silhouetted on the horizon. (F) The new engine placed Studebaker in a more competitive position than the other independents but it alone could not negate their horrid cost situation and the botched launch of the new design in 1953.
The Olds and Cadillac V-8 had started an avalanche. One by one, almost every other American manufacturer brought out its own OHV V-8 engine; Chrysler and Studebaker in 1951; Lincoln in 1952; Buick and Dodge in 1953; Ford and Mercury in 1954; Chevrolet, Pontiac, Plymouth, and Packard in 1955; and even AMC in 1956. Each of those engines had its own peculiarities, but they were all in the mold of the Oldsmobile and Caddy V-8. The overhead-valve V-8 would dominate the American industry well into the 1980s, resulting in some staggeringly powerful engines whose output has only recently been surpassed.
So here it was, Studebaker had their V-8 and had just signed on to produce a line of low, swoopy, clearly gorgeous coupes in 1953 that would forever be called, “Loewy coupes”. The designers had viewed this car as a low production kind of “halo” car. It seemed that no thought had been given to just how it would look as a higher more truncated sedan. It looked small and unusual and sold poorly. One of the basic facts of automotive life is that designers love working on convertibles, coupes and sports cars; it’s up to the adult supervision to bring them back to reality. The four door family sedan was the cash cow of all “full line” automobile manufactures; it remains a mystery how the mesmering glow of the pretty coupe design had made Studebaker management lose sight of that basic business fact. A sampling of road test, new model introduction articles showed almost no interest in the sedan, they seem to be rarely even mentioned. (P) (O) (Q) They wanted an innovative, bold design to yank them from their sales doldrums but instead they piled on another layer of problems. As Stated by H.L. Mencken, “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
By 1954 they had stumbled into a merger agreement with Packard that closely resembled two drowning men reaching for a single life preserver. As they merged both companies were losing fearful amounts of money struggling with disappearing sales, obsolete plants and a high cost structure.
In my opinion Studebaker’s demise could have been predicted and avoided by a more intuitive management in the early fifties. In 1950 they had money, a shiny new V-8 ready for launch and many choices for a new car design. They chose the path to continue as a “full Line” manufacturer. They were the only independent with a full line of trucks and heavy defense work. Given that, it should have been possible for management to look into the future a bit and see that the defense work would wane, the competitors could compound “economies of scale” and their labor costs were outrageous. Insight into the future to plan and react is the definition of good management. Others usually handle the day-to-day operational decisions; foresight is what management is paid for and this is where Studebaker stumbled badly.
With our benefit of hindsight we can fantasize that an early move into a high-quality, niche player situation may very well have worked. Porsche, Aston Martin, Morgan and even Avanti Motors come to mind. The key would have been recognizing the confluence of problems they would face early on. As Charles Darwin famously stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to Change.”
I can visualize (Ok dream) of a Studebaker company in the fifties that actually analyzed it’s situation and realized that it had very rarely exceeded it’s breakeven point in revenue from vehicles excluding the military business. Since 1941 an almost constant level of military vehicle contracts had propped it up. Could they possibly have thought they would always get the contracts? In my dream they decide to become a high-quality, low volume niche manufacturer, it would require them to shed truck, sedans and most of their unwieldy dealer network. It would be difficult but so was trying to market the awkward conversion of the Lowey coupe to a four-door sedan. The Avanti, Hawks and Speedster showed their design expertise was greatest in specialty, essentially niche automobiles. A breakeven point of 40 to 60 thousand highly styled, high quality autos would seem doable while an every two year cycle of complete redesign of a full product line on dwindling revenues proved to be “a bridge to far” for them. There was that brief window when they had the money. Porsche with their 911, Leyland with the Mini and the seemingly timeless Avanti show that a great design, if properly exploited, remains viable far into the future. The key seems to be “design character” that is able to transcend time. It doesn’t have to be a high-end vehicle, it just has to be true to it’s intended use. The Volkswagen beetle was designed as a high-quality, inexpensive and extremely durable automobile. It was produced virtually unchanged for many decades and became a legend. On the other side of the spectrum sits the Porsche 911; a costly, high-quality, state of the art piece of rolling art that proves that if form follows function then design continuity works. Porsche and Volkswagen didn’t tinker with the original purpose of the vehicle, enhancements were complementary to the original theme be it performance or thrift. The Gran Turismo was a wonderful effort but came to market well after the buying public had tired of the many years of Studebaker struggles. I wonder what would have been had a Sherwood Egbert and Brooks Stevens surfaced early on. They seem to have “got it.”
It’s fantasy but remember the Avanti soldered on for 30 plus years despite chronic under funding. The new V-8 was sorely needed but it certainly couldn’t solve all of Studebaker’s problems.
As this is written it appears that our remaining US auto manufacturers have fallen behind their peers in cost control and innovation forgetting the history of their own industry. The buying public in its group Knowledge is able to discern what is the better product. A sales salvation isn’t possible without having the better product. Its very sad that our current Automobile manufactures have lost sight of how to provide the overall value that their customers demand (R)
The final days of Studebaker saw some wonderful car designs created on budgets that wouldn’t fund a door handle design at GM. The Speedster, Hawks, Lark, Gran Turismo and Avanti were tributes to what I think were the best designers in Detroit. They consistently updated the aged designs and produced many timeless and distinctly different cars. Everything they worked on was based on a design at least 13 years old.
The little V-8 was able to run at 147.36 MPH for 50 Kilometers. The Supercharged Stude V-8 set 72 new USAC records IN 1962 including 118.33 MPH for 500 kilometers and a top speed of 153.48 MPH. Heady stuff for a lark. (F) (D)
Studebaker failed, as most companies do, from management failure compounded by a lack of understanding of the company’s situation. In their death throes they created milestone designs that turn heads today. The failure of Studebaker is constantly reviewed because of the recognition of what could have been. A management with vision could have made them into a niche contender, an icon. In 2008, many decades since the doors closed, the Studebaker Drivers Club (SDC) is the largest and one of the most active single Marquee clubs. That’s a great tribute to their design skill and just plane pluck.
Sources:
(A) 1953 Hop-up magazine manual of New Engines by Eugene Jaderquist and Griff Borgeesen
(B) The Studebaker V-8 engine; a presentation by E.J. Hardig, T.A. Scherger and S.W. Sparrow at the SAE Summer meting on 6-7-1951
(C) Engine Report, Studebaker V-8 by Classic Auto Restorer, February, 1997
(D) Total performance Independents by Richard Datson
(E) Studebaker Extreme Duty Engine Book by Richard Datson, (1995 edition)
(F) Studebaker, the complete history by Patrick Foster
(G) Road Test Comments on the McCulloch Supercharger, Motor Life, August 1955 article on Supercharged Speedster
(H) Popular Science, November, 1954
(J) Special Interest Autos, SIA #51, June 1979
(K) The last onslaught on Detroit by Richard M. Langworth
(L) Ultimate American Engine Data by Motorbooks
(M) Speed Age, April 1953, America’s First Motor racing Magazine
(N) Consumer Reports, March, 1955
(O) Speed Age, September, 1953
(P) Fortune Magazine, Automobile Topics, February 1953
(Q) Popular Science, February 1953
(R) The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Friday, January 2, 2009
I spent a few hours at the 1-2-09 KRUSE auction in Boca Raton. It looked to me to be not as well attended as I would have expected although that might be due to there being a competing auction that’s of much longer standing in Ft. Lauderdale the same days. There are only so many collector car fans and splitting them doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I thought prices seemed lower but not as low as I would have thought. There were all kinds of SS, GTO and Roadrunner clones and some of them were remarkably well done and bringing decent money. I didn’t document many cars as my interests are Corvettes and Studebakers, forgive me.
--1951 Studebaker Starlight coupe, the only Studebaker there had painted fender welting, horrid old cracked and dirty tires but was otherwise a pretty good car Bid to $17K, owner wouldn’t drop reserve saying he had a buyer who had offered $21K. If true I think well sold @ 21K
--72 Corvette conv. With air and matching numbers sold at $23K
--2007 Vette Indi-500 conv. With 35 miles on it sold @ $42.5K (Leftover from 07???) originally a $71K sticker car.
--1964 Conv. With bad body gaps , claimed original but had a 327 NOM with Hooker headers and such. Good paint, resale red. Sold at $34,250
--77 Corvette T-Top with an awkward tri-color paint job far to personal to be attractive no sale bid to $13,500
--1965 blue Vette Coupe, matching #s, great body gaps, lousy black accent paint on side pipe covers (looked like a 5 yr old did it.)Very good driver sold at $43, 250
--1976 red vette T-Top nice, matching #s air-auto no sell bid to $11K
All in all a fun day in the sun looking at old cars and young women.
I thought prices seemed lower but not as low as I would have thought. There were all kinds of SS, GTO and Roadrunner clones and some of them were remarkably well done and bringing decent money. I didn’t document many cars as my interests are Corvettes and Studebakers, forgive me.
--1951 Studebaker Starlight coupe, the only Studebaker there had painted fender welting, horrid old cracked and dirty tires but was otherwise a pretty good car Bid to $17K, owner wouldn’t drop reserve saying he had a buyer who had offered $21K. If true I think well sold @ 21K
--72 Corvette conv. With air and matching numbers sold at $23K
--2007 Vette Indi-500 conv. With 35 miles on it sold @ $42.5K (Leftover from 07???) originally a $71K sticker car.
--1964 Conv. With bad body gaps , claimed original but had a 327 NOM with Hooker headers and such. Good paint, resale red. Sold at $34,250
--77 Corvette T-Top with an awkward tri-color paint job far to personal to be attractive no sale bid to $13,500
--1965 blue Vette Coupe, matching #s, great body gaps, lousy black accent paint on side pipe covers (looked like a 5 yr old did it.)Very good driver sold at $43, 250
--1976 red vette T-Top nice, matching #s air-auto no sell bid to $11K
All in all a fun day in the sun looking at old cars and young women.
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