Packard Request
Car of the Day #243: 1955 Packard Request – No Comment
Have you heard of the word sonder?
First envisioned and published within The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, sonder is he realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Growing up a fan of all things European or Japanese, I had the same profound realization a few years ago about older American cars: they are just as valid, advanced, and steeped in history as the very best from Europe.
They simply hit different.
Sounds silly? Imagine spending hours watching Honda dominate F1, Porsche dominate sports car racing, and Lancia dominate rally, plus Top Gear-era American car banter and you understand my point.
Packard? What’s a Packard?
Some tome ago, I featured another Richard “Dick” Teague design, the AMC Amitron. A reader wrote in to mention that Teague's firm would design just about anything — including the interiors for Boeing jetliners.
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However, in 1955, quite early in his career, he was the chief stylist chained to the rapidly-sinking Packard.
In its prime, Packard (for those of you under the age of 90) was sort of a modern Citroën, Lexus, and Rolls-Royce combined.
Packard was innovative, it was customer-focused, and it was the chosen car for wealthy clients around the globe. Even the Japanese Emperor Hirohito had a Packard.
By 1955, Packard was falling fast and would be dead just four years later.
Concept cars, still a new thing, were seen as a way to stay relevant during the Jet Age of American motoring, but the company couldn't keep up, let alone move forward: every Packard concept was built on an existing production model.
For the 1955 show car circuit, Ford had the Futura, a concept that became the Batmobile. And modestly, a styling concept called the Nucleon…to be powered by a small nuclear reactor.
General Motors had its gas turbine-powered Firebird concept.
Packard, in equal parts innovative (always read the comments) and shrewd (see above) responded by reading their fan mail.
In essence, Teague crowdsourced the 1955 Request concept.
Countless customers and fans wrote in to say that they missed the classic Packard grille. You know, the one put on its cars from before the First World War.
So Packard took a standard 1955 Four Hundred hardtop and grafted on an old-school nose. The whole H(ack) job took 90 days.
But don't let the photos fool you: adding a fat, tall, thick, radiator-aping chrome nose to a car also adds weight; 181 kg (400 lbs), to be exact.
Some say it ruined the car's handling (imagine both Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill sitting on your bumper) but the company had a little-appreciated innovation under the skin: Packard Torsion-Level Suspension.
Similar to the Citroën 2CV's suspension (but significantly more heavy-duty), the front and rear of the car were linked by torsion bars. Doing this allowed the force of a bump to be transferred fore or aft, and not vertically into the chassis.
It was electro-mechanical and helped keep the car level. And, importantly, available on the company's production cars. 1955 would be the last good year for the company.
Packard Torsion-Level Suspension linked the rear wheels with the wheel in front, transmitting the force of a bump forward or backward. It's something that I'm surprised isn't replicated today, given the major advances in computer processing and electric motors.
Of course, the company's last major innovation wasn't its final attempt at capturing the public's imagination. But that's a story for another day…
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