Packard Clipper
The Packard Clipper is an automobile series built by the Packard Motor Car Company for model years 1941–1942, 1946–1947, and 1953–1957. It was named for a type of sailing ship, called a clipper.
The Clipper was introduced in April 1941, as a mid-model year entry. It was available only as a four-door sedan. The extreme top-rung high hat models had had their day, with engineering improvements, less expensive, more rationally sized fare predominating. Since the action was in the increasingly sophisticated, upper-medium price field, the debut Clipper line was aimed at Buick Roadmaster, Cadillac's cutthroat-priced Model 62, Chrysler Saratoga/New Yorker, and Lincoln. The Clipper name was re-introduced in 1953, for the automaker's lowest-priced lineup, leading some to think it was a cheap car initially, instead of a full-range offering. By 1955, the Clipper models were seen as diluting Packard's marketing as a luxury automobile marque.
The Clipper was classified as a stand-alone marque for the 1956 model year when it was produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation. Following the closure of Packard's Detroit, Michigan factory in 1956, the Clipper marque was discontinued, although the Clipper name was applied to 1957 Packards that were built at Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana, factory.
1941–1947
By the end of the 1930s, Packard president Max M. Gilman realized that efforts to improve the company's profitability during the previous decade. The Packard One-Twenty model was introduced in 1935 and its success in the marketplace helped save the company. The One-Ten had followed, achieving even higher volume. Despite a strong performance during 1937, Packard sales plummeted during the recession in 1938. The automaker's 76,000 sales for the calendar year 1939 were barely at its break-even point. Packard achieved a profit of only half-million dollars. This precarious financial state, combined with new model developments among Packard's rivals, meant Gilman quickly needed something radically new to keep the company going.The company developed a new car that was introduced eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Packard's hopes for the future rode on the new Packard Clipper line that represented a break from traditional styling and embodied an abrupt change in construction techniques. However, World War II intervened. It made Packard's investment to produce one of the only all-new 1941 American cars impossible to realize in the altered conditions.
Initial reception
The Clipper's market timing could not have been worse. After only 16,600 of the 1941 models were made, and a few thousand 1942s, Detroit stopped building civilian automobiles to concentrate on defense production. By the time cars began rolling off the lines again in late 1945, the still sleek Clipper's impact had been diminished by four years of war. The bright promise of its debut was limited by late introduction; what should have been its solid sophomore year was weakened by World War II. Its third and fourth years were postponed until 1946–47. Though Packard designer John Reinhart and other Company insiders wanted to retain and "sweeten" the Clipper's svelte lines, Packard management felt pressured by new, industry-wide postwar designs, thus introducing the mixed review "bathtub" or "pregnant elephant" 1948–1950 Packards.There were only two other automakers introducing all-new 1941 models which were stopped short by the American entry into World War II and thus rendered obsolete before their time. Besides Packard, Ford brought out a much-changed design for the 1941 model year — the restyled Ford and its Mercury clone. Nash also produced all-new 1941 models, using monocoque "unitized" construction for the first time. General Motors redesigned for 1942, arguably a piece of bad timing even worse than Packard's, but the 1942 cars were so relatively few in number that they still looked reasonably new when GM resumed automotive production in 1946. The Ford/Mercury comparison was not apt either, primarily because these were quite different cars from Packards, with no pretense of luxury. Nor did their design history mirror the Clipper's. The 1941 Fords and Mercurys were evolutionary developments, clearly related to the 1940s they replaced. The Clipper was such a dramatic break with the previous Packard design as to preclude comparisons.
After the war, while Packard opted to improve the Clipper, while other automakers restyled its models for 1949. While the bulbous 1941–48 Fords, Mercuries, and Nashes were replaced by modern designs, the Clipper was undone by a bulbous 1948 upgrade that, while well received in its initial year, aged quickly in comparison with the new models from the "Big Three" and Nash, and cost as much to reskin as a wholly new car would've cost. A 1949 Mercury Eight which had cost $2,000 new was still worth $430 five years later, while a 1949 Packard Eight which had cost $2,200 new was worth only $375. Motor Trend automotive journalist Tom McCahill, who had raved about the '46 Packard Clipper Deluxe eight, called the 1948 Packard "a dowager in a Queen Elizabeth hat," and "a goat.'
The Clipper's timing was unfortunate. The state of the world being beyond Packard's control, Clipper production came to a halt on February 9, 1942, just as it was hitting its stride and when Clipper styling had spread through the entire Packard model lineup.
Style identity
A full envelope body with a modern look was a long time coming at Packard. Cadillac was wearing pontoon fenders and flowing lines by 1934 and had adopted all-steel bodies by 1935. In 1936, Lincoln announced the Zephyr, with an all-steel unibody, and a shape so advanced that derivations of it were still in production twelve years later. Chrysler also tried introducing a streamlined platform which the market didn't respond well to, named the Chrysler Airflow. By comparison, Packard adhered to traditional, crisp, conservative styling. Its main acknowledgment of new-era styling was the skirted fender which appeared in 1933. Packard – like Lincoln and Cadillac – had survived the Depression by building medium-priced cars: the One Twenty, Zephyr, and LaSalle, respectively. But unlike its rivals, Packard styling had remained arch-traditional. Unlike Lincoln, Packard followed the medium-priced One-Twenty with an almost-low-priced car, the Six. Unlike Cadillac, Packard refused to market its cheaper models by a different name and remained wedded to them long after prosperity had returned. By 1941, the year the Clipper debuted, the least expensive Cadillac was priced at $1,445; the lowest priced Packard sold for only $927.Arguably its conservative design philosophy had stood Packard well in the years leading up to the Clipper. The company was able to advertise—and sold quite a few Packards with—styling continuity from year to year. There was a family resemblance between a 1939 and a 1932. In 1939, the comparison of its One Twenty with the LaSalle, the company declared that: "Packard has style identity...Packard styling is consistent...But look at the 1938 LaSalle! About the only similarity is in the name, and who can be sure that a sudden fanciful style change won't make the 1939 a style orphan?"
Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royce survived for years with very expensive but dated designs. Packard also survived with limited styling change for at least eight or nine years up through 1940. Packard's hallmarks were good ones: the chiseled frontispiece; the grille recalling classic Greek architecture; the ox-yoke radiator/hood shape harkened back to the Model L of 1904. The cormorant mascot, red hexagon hubs, and arrowhead side-spear, were recognizable and timeless.
To create a modern envelope body while retaining those famous hallmarks was no small undertaking. It was still one of the chief accomplishments of automotive industrial design that the people who created the Packard Clipper were able to do so flawlessly. Advertising invited America to "Skipper the Clipper" in 1941. It was showing the country an obviously brand-new, up to date, in Packard's words, "Windstream" or "Speed-Stream" automobile, yet one which was still undeniably a Packard. Though it did not owe a curve or contour to any previous model, the milestone 1941 Clipper carried the same inimitable radiator and hood shape, as well as the same arrowheads and red hexes, and the same long hood and close-coupled profile of Packards of the past.
Design
Writing in The Classic Car and The Packard Cormorant, Joel Prescott published an account of the Clipper design which considerably revised the picture offered by George Hamlin and Dwight Heinmuller in Packard: A History of the Motor Car and The Company, published by Automotive Quarterly. James A. Ward's book on the decline of the Packard Motor Car Company includes views of designers such as Howard Darrin, John Reinhart, William Reithard, and Alex Tremulis.Prior to World War II, Packard, like most auto companies at the time, did not have a styling department. It was Harley Earl's formidable Art and Colour Section at General Motors that convinced the industry of the importance of styling. A handful of outside consultants, like Raymond Loewy at Studebaker, occasionally sold their designs to American producers. Sometimes the designs even reached production without drastic changes by the body engineers, who at that point largely controlled the shape of cars. One such design consultant was Howard "Dutch" Darrin, whose involvement in the Clipper occurred because Packard was his favorite American make.
After returning to America in 1937 following a successful career as a Paris coachbuilder, Darrin looked around for chassis on which to practice his automotive art. He said, "I concentrated on Packards knowing that by lowering the radiator I could make a very beautiful custom-bodied Packard with little change in its basic structure." The result was a long skein of dramatic Packard-Darrins, which were actually cataloged by the company at one point and which led to Darrin's role in the Clipper. "Around 1940, Packard called and asked if I'd design a new standard line car for them. The hitch was that I had only ten days to do so, Chief stylist Ed Macauley would be on the coast for that amount of time, and if I didn't have anything before he left, it would be a lost cause. The company offered me a thousand dollars a day if I could meet the deadline."
Confident in his ability to put a thousand a day to good use, Darrin said he thought he "could establish enough lines for a full- and quarter-scale model". Later he said that to meet the deadline, he "slept several nights on a drafting table", yet Packard never paid him.
Kaiser-Frazer stylist Bob Robillard admitted that Darrin had held onto his claim as the originator of the Clipper almost from the start. A 1946, Darrin paper delivered before the Society of Automotive Engineers, "Does Styling Control the Design of Cars?" stating that he widened the Clipper body because the continuous fender-line, which comes right through the door past the A-pillar, required more width for the proper hinging of the door, "the net result being a wider and more roomy car." However, according to Reithard, "the parameters for track, wheelbase and overall length had been established. Other than that, we had very little to go on except some very rough sketches and hand-waving from Darrin."
While Darrin held himself the central design figure and the original design "called for a sweeping front fender-line that carried right through the doors to the rise of the rear fender, similar to a custom Clipper I built later for Errol Flynn". However, Packard shortened the sweep to fade away at mid-door. This was done as a hedge because no one knew if the through-fender-line would sell. He said Packard Styling also "vandalized the design by throwing on huge gobs of clay along the wheelbase" creating a flare to the lower part of the doors to hide the running boards they added for the same reason. Thus, by Darrin's own admission, the Clipper that appeared in production was not entirely his work. Few designers besides Darrin believed this splendid car was the product of ten days' work. But despite the work of Packard's designers, the Clipper's theme was clearly Darrin's, confirmed by Alex Tremulis and other insiders.
At the time Packard contacted Darrin about designing a production car in the theme of his limited-production Victorias, the company was, according to Darrin, "....so afraid of GM they couldn't see straight." GM's new C bodies, introduced midway through the 1940 model year, made Packard's traditional bodies, only facelifted since their 1938 introduction, look dated. Packard had, as Darrin said, "....the best chassis in the industry," but upper-echelon GMobiles looked more modern than Packard's traditional 1941 bodies. 1941 Buick and Cadillac sales were up 24% while Packard's traditional bodied cars down an accordant amount.
The Clipper changed that. The only thing hindering the Clipper's ascendency was War II, and after the war, the sheet steel shortages and strikes at vendors plagued all independents. After the war, for example, Chrysler was held up for weeks just by a strike at the supplier of their door locks. Being a holding company, GM was better able to weather this situation.
Perhaps the best summation of the Clipper's design comes from Joel Prescott: "The truth may well be that the Clipper should be remembered as automotive history's most successful committee design, because assigning the genius of its beautiful lines exclusively to one particular designer cannot now be done with any degree of certainty." And as it turned out, this new look guaranteed the Clipper an appearance never compromised by competitive imitators. In 1942 Cadillac and Buick adopted the same pontoon fender line, but the Clipper still looked unique, apart from and slightly above the crowd, especially the new 1942 senior Clippers, which alone retained the debut 1941's wheelbase, longer hood, and front fenders.
The Clipper was to be Packard's last bellringer not just for the Forties, but through the firm's 1956 demise, another reason its name brought back in 1953. Though introduced in April 1941, the Clipper, despite priced between the One-Twenty and One-Sixty, outsold the entire year's One-Twenty production.