(EXPANDED FROM 1/1/2020)
The Studebaker Avanti is arguably one of the most important American automotive designs of the 1960s. It has quite rightly been described by historian Patrick Foster as “one of the most beautiful automobiles ever to grace the road” (2008, p. 138).
In describing the Avanti’s skunk works-style development in a Palm Springs, California rented house, Maggie Downs (2018) waxed poetic:
“The result is a sun-soaked dreamscape of an automobile. The Avanti body is the automotive equivalent of someone tanning next to a saltwater pool, sleek as the swimmer who just emerged from the deep end. It couldn’t possibly be more Palm Springs, even if it were shaken and adorned with an olive.”
While some may disagree with that sunny assessment by pointing to the Avanti’s various design quirks, the basic look was clearly decades ahead of its time.
I consider the Avanti to be a genuine classic but would also suggest that it shouldn’t have been built. From a business standpoint, the car was a disaster. Studebaker could have plausibly extended its time as an automobile manufacturer by investing its meager resources in a car with a better chance of an immediate payback.
We’ll talk more about the Avanti’s bad business case in a moment, but let’s first delve into the nuances of the car’s design. To truly appreciate the Avanti you have to consider that it was based upon some pretty old components. Most notably, the chassis and cowl dated back to the 1953 Studebaker Starliner hardtop. That car was considered cutting edge when introduced, but by the early-60s its modestly updated successor, the Hawk, had become decidedly old hat.
A surprisingly advanced twist on an old design
Unlike virtually every other American passenger car of the early-60s, you didn’t “step down” into a Hawk — or an Avanti — when entering. The floor was essentially level with the door sills. This resulted in less leg room than with a more modern chassis even though the Studebaker coupes were typically taller than their nearest competitors.
In addition, the Avanti’s cowl appears to be based upon the Starliner coupe’s — which by the early-60s was too tall and rounded to look contemporary. By the same token, the windshield was unusually upright, flat and small.
The Avanti’s designers — long-time Studebaker consultant Raymond Loewy and associates Tom Kellogg, Robert Andrews and John Ebstein — worked around the old-fashioned windshield by with some clever design ideas. These included curved side glass, a coke-bottle beltline, a “foot-arch” character line above the door windows, an off-center power dome on the hood that swept into the dash board, and a jacked-up rear end that gave Studebaker-produced Avantis a pronounced wedge profile.
Whatever else one might say about the Avanti’s styling, it represented a remarkably clever attempt to update an obsolete body.
The Avanti’s styling didn’t just distinguish it from previous Studebaker coupes — and anything else on the road. The car’s shape was also exceptionally aerodynamic for its time. Jim Crow of Road & Track estimated that the Avanti’s drag coefficient was in “the high 0.30s,” according to Richard M. Langworth. Engineers at Porsche found the Avanti “notably free of air friction at high speed, and were amazed when Loewy told them he’d designed it without a wind tunnel” (Langworth, 1993; p. 139).
The Avanti’s styling was not universally praised
The Avanti’s unique styling was not always well received when it was introduced. Langworth quoted Road & Track’s negative assessment: “(G)reat liberties have been taken merely to achieve the effect — the styling is contrived, straining for visual impact to the exclusion of utility, or efficiency, or grace” (1993, p. 136).
More recently, Paul Niedermeyer (2016) has compared the Avanti to small, coach-built British coupes in its design brilliance mixed in with amateurish eccentricities.
From some angles the Avanti arguably looks half baked. For example, the body’s pronounced side creases abruptly end at the wheel cut outs, which can look doubly odd because of their backward slope. And while the jacked-up rear makes the front look lower, it also elevates the C-pillar above the A-pillar. That arguably gives the Avanti too much of a boy-racer look for what was marketed as a European-style grand touring coupe.
Some of these design quirks were fixed after Studebaker stopped making the Avanti and production was taken over by a separate company. Most notably, the front of the car needed to be elevated a few inches in order to fit taller engines from General Motors. This arguably improved the Avanti’s looks.
By the same token, in the early-80s the Avanti received body-colored wrap-around bumpers that better-integrated the side crease with the front and rear.
The Avanti interior improves upon the Hawk’s
The Avanti’s interior displayed a similar level of cleverness in making what was essentially an old car look strikingly advanced. Perhaps the biggest challenge was the tall cowl. In updating the Hawk’s styling for 1962, design consultant Brooks Stevens had come up with a more modern dashboard that included an innovative three-plane instrument cluster. However, the overall design still accentuated the cowl’s height and old-fashioned curvature.
The Avanti design also used a three-plane instrument cluster but gave the overall dashboard a much lower, flatter and more three-dimensional appearance. This made the front passenger compartment airier and more modern than the Hawk’s. The interior was further upgraded with elegantly sculpted seats, a large center console and more upscale door trim.
Additional design flourishes included aircraft-style overhead control switches, flip-out rear windows, an integrated roll bar, a vanity mirror in the glove box, and access to the trunk from a door atop the rear package shelf. The doors had special safety locks made by Daimler-Benz. To protect the gas tank from collisions, it was located behind the rear seat rather than in the trunk (Langworth, 1993).
The Avanti was a more compact version of the Hawk
Avanti designers didn’t carry over the Hawk’s 120.5-inch wheelbase. Instead, they placed the car on the 109-inch chassis used for the Lark two-door convertible. That resulted in much better proportions for what was essentially a compact platform.
The downside was that the Hawk’s cramped rear accommodations were accentuated because all of the wheelbase reduction couldn’t come ahead of the cowl without destroying the requisite long-hood, short-deck look.
Also see ‘Might Studebaker have survived if Sherwood Egbert had stayed healthy?’
What to do? One step designers appear to have taken was to eliminate the Hawk’s downward roofline slope over the rear seat, which likely bought a bit more headroom. In addition, the Avanti’s more sculpted bucket seats may have been partly motivated by the need to squeeze out additional rear knee room.
The Avanti was 192 inches long, which was roughly a foot shorter than the Hawk. The radically different proportions of the two cars illustrates how much American automotive design had evolved in just one decade.
For example, Loewy’s teardrop shape was ditched in favor of the then-trendy coke-bottle look. This may have helped to preserve trunk space despite the Avanti’s shorter deck by increasing the trunk’s height.
A cross between a Corvette and a Thunderbird?
In a vague sense the Avanti could be described as a cross between the sportiness of a Chevrolet Corvette and the luxury of a Ford Thunderbird. Even so, the Avanti had such a unique mixture of attributes that it didn’t directly compete against any other American personal coupe.
The same was true when comparing the Avanti to imports. The Studebaker evoked more expensive European sports cars with its then-exotic front disc brakes, but an unsophisticated chassis borrowed from the plebeian Lark limited its sporting pretensions. Langworth noted that in street form the Avanti was “a civilized, high-speed grand touring car, not a dual-purpose race-and-ride sports car” (1993, p. 140).
Also see ‘1953-70 Chevrolet Corvette ads gingerly showed changing gender roles’
Consumer Reports (1963) was not as positive as Langworth about the Avanti’s roadworthiness. “There is more understeer in this car than in the Riviera or Thunderbird, and the general handling level is lower, although much better than in other Studebakers.”
The above critique illustrates why Studebaker made the right decision in not attempting to compete directly against the Chevrolet Corvette. Studebaker Corporation President Sherwood Egbert had initially wanted the Avanti to be a two-passenger sports car (Foster, 2008).
Sized like a pony car but much more expensive
The Avanti’s dimensions most closely resemble those of the Ford Mustang and Plymouth Barracuda. Ironically, both of these cars were introduced a few months after Studebaker management decided to cease Avanti production when the automaker’s South Bend, Indiana plant was permanently closed in December 1963.
Despite the Avanti’s compact dimensions, its list price was higher than a Corvette’s and similar to that of a base Thunderbird coupe. The Avanti was thus relatively expensive for an American car. Like the Thunderbird, its price in 1964 was roughly $200 more than a Buick Electra — a top-of-line premium-priced car.
Perhaps more importantly, the Avanti was substantially more expensive than increasingly popular sporty coupes. For example, the Pontiac’s Grand Prix listed for almost $1,000 less and the GTO was roughly $1,400 less expensive.
In contrast, the Hawk was much closer to the heart of the sporty coupe market. In 1964 the car had a list price of just under $3,000 — almost matching a GTO two-door hardtop.
When the Mustang arrived in the spring of 1964, its base price was $2,368. You could have bought almost two strippo Mustangs for the price of one Avanti, which had listed for $4,445 in the fall of 1963.
Of course, a key part of the Mustang’s business case was that most buyers would select a variety of options that would bulk up the price. In addition, once Detroit realized that personal coupes were a hot commodity, even base prices began to escalate.
The graph below illustrates this. Whereas a Pontiac GTO convertible listed for under $3,100 in 1964, five years later a top-end Judge model exceeded $4,200 — which was only a few hundred dollars less than a Corvette.
Or consider the Mustang. In 1969 list prices topped out much higher than in 1964 because of fancier models such as the Mach 1. In addition, specialty car manufacturer Shelby offered a line of tricked-out Mustangs that were priced deep into what was once rarified Avanti territory.
Studebaker attempts to catch the personal coupe wave
Egbert was new to the auto industry but his instincts were proven correct that the personal coupe market was a good place to be in the mid-60s. One could also plausibly argue that he took a reasonable gamble in pricing the Avanti so high.
The data that he had to work with in 1961-62 suggested that Americans were increasingly willing to pay good money for a personal coupe. Thunderbird production almost hit 93,000 in 1960. This was roughly 30,000 more than the highest-selling upper-premium nameplate, the Buick Electra.
Corvette volume was far lower but had gradually increased from roughly 6,300 units in 1957 to almost 11,000 in 1961.
Egbert projected that first-year Avanti sales could reach 20,000 units (Langworth, 1993). That wasn’t a crazy idea — at least in theory. The market for personal coupes was exploding. Corvette volume almost hit 22,000 units in 1963 — more than double 1961 output — with the introduction of the iconic Sting Ray.
Meanwhile, Pontiac Grand Prix production soared to 73,000 units and the Buick Riviera’s introductory year saw a quite respectable 40,000 copies leaving the factory.
Even the ancient Hawk, once given a mild restyling in 1962, saw production almost triple to roughly 8,400 units.
In retrospect, we know that the future looked even brighter for personal coupes. The most obvious sign of the times was the rise of the so-called pony car market. The Mustang alone saw sales surpass 1.7 million by the end of the 1969 model year. Even the limited-production Shelby Mustangs managed to find 13,000 customers between 1966 and 1969.
By all rights the Avanti should have been at least a modest success. Instead, it flopped. Avanti output failed to reach 5,000 units during its entire year-and-a-half production run. This was way down in Shelby territory.
The Avanti didn’t fail because of production delays
Some have argued that poor sales resulted from production delays regarding the Avanti’s fiberglass body. For example, Dan Jedlicka (2018) wrote, “Many Avanti buyers canceled advance orders and bought a Corvette or other sporty cars.”
Otto Klausmeyer, Studebaker’s longtime assistant manufacturing manager, dismissed that theory. He told Langworth that the Avanti was “a greater sales ‘dog’ than the Edsel” (1993, p. 142).
“‘The painful truth was that although we had very serious body difficulties, they were soon overcome and unsold Avantis were all over the shop and in dealer’s hands,’ Klausmeyer stated. ‘This car was probably the poorest selling new job that Studebaker ever built.’ Part of the problem may have been the car’s unusual styling, which Klausmeyer described as ‘the world’s first, droop-snoot, duck-back sports car'” (Langworth, 1993, p. 142).
This is arguably an overly negative assessment of the Avanti. However, those who blame the car’s failure on production delays don’t tend to explain how the Avanti could have survived even a typical six-year production cycle if sales dried up so quickly after launch.
Too polarizing, too boy racer and too expensive
The Avanti is such a mesmerizing design that it is easy to forget that this car was a significant gamble for a struggling small automaker. Studebaker really needed a quick hit.
Instead of being pragmatic, Egbert and Loewy doubled down on exotic. For example, today the swept back and grilleless fascia may look conventional, but back then it was decidedly polarizing. The same couldn’t be said for the front-end designs of popular sporty coupes of that era such as the Mustang.
To compound matters, the Avanti had too many boy racer touches to be a credible grand touring coupe, let alone a somewhat sportier alternative to the Thunderbird. As a case in point, Egbert called for “the loudest mufflers that could get past the law,” according to Langworth (1993, p. 138). Here the Studebaker president may have been trying to overcompensate for being stuck with a relatively small 289-cubic-inch V8 when a horsepower arms race was brewing in Detroit.
“The public didn’t understand that car,” Stevens ruefully concluded about the Avanti (Adamson, 2003; p. 154).
Another factor in the Avanti’s failure could have been that Studebaker had no experience selling such a premium-priced car. Aaron Severson (2008) noted that “the Avanti was very pricey, especially for a marque that was not exactly dripping with prestige.”
The Avanti might have sold better initially if it had been introduced with a lower price than both the Corvette and the Thunderbird — even if that meant a certain amount of decontenting. Studebaker went in the opposite direction by adopting the then-unorthodox strategy of offering one well-equipped model with relatively few options.
Ford’s success with the Thunderbird suggested that a popularly priced brand could also sell a premium-priced specialty car. However, Studebaker had the disadvantage of possessing a small and struggling dealer network.
The Avanti might have succeeded if it had more time
Perhaps what Egbert most needed was time — to build the dealer network’s capacity to sell an expensive (and unusual) car, to change public perceptions of the brand, and wait for the market for grand touring coupes to expand. Alas, Studebaker’s financial situation was too dire to patiently “grow” the Avanti in much the same way that General Motors had done with the Corvette.
Also see ‘Classic film shows human side of Studebaker’s end’
On top of all that, some potential Avanti buyers likely went elsewhere due to the fear that a Studebaker would become an “orphan.” As it turned out, this was an entirely reasonable concern. Nevertheless, the Hawk — which presumably suffered from the same kind of buyer resistance — consistently outsold the Avanti even after production snafus for the latter had been fixed.
The punchline is that something went more than a little wrong for a snazzy new design to be outsold by a car that still had sheetmetal dating back to 1953. The Avanti was sunk by a boatload of beginner’s mistakes.
Studebaker couldn’t afford a stand-alone coupe
I would suggest that the development costs of the Avanti — Langworth (1993) reports $3.5 million — were too great for Studebaker unless it helped fund a full line of cars that could be based on one platform. Unfortunately, the Avanti’s fiberglass body didn’t lend itself to a higher-volume, popularly priced family sedan and wagon.
This is not a new idea. Stevens argued that the money spent on the Avanti — he used a $5 million figure — would have been better spent updating Studebaker’s family cars (Adamson, 2003). Stevens had developed an all-new sedan, wagon and coupe (Strohl, 2016).
If Stevens’s designs had reached production, they would have carried over Studebaker’s old chassis. Their low-slung appearance was admirably modern, but even the four-door models look like they were not very roomy.
Also see ‘Brooks Stevens’s 1965 Studebaker Lark concept: Almost a baby Continental’
To make matters worse, the new body apparently did not share any major components with an existing Studebaker. As a result, they presumably would have been considerably more expensive to tool up for than a competing proposal from Loewy’s consulting firm.
Loewy developed a line of steel-bodied family cars inspired by the Avanti’s styling. The cars — which advanced to the prototype stage — appeared to have been based upon the Hawk body because of their tall and rounded cowl. The overall styling was unusually clean for the time, but the lack of curved side glass accentuated a tall, boxy greenhouse that clashed with coke bottle-shaped fenders (Strohl, 2010).
Both the Stevens and Loewy design proposals have interesting elements, but neither was likely to have “saved Studebaker” if they had reached production.
What if the Avanti had been a Lark variant?
Might a more competitive line of family cars have been financially feasible if they had been spun off a steel-bodied Avanti? With some tweaks the Avanti design was arguably versatile enough to have spawned a new-generation Lark sedan, wagon and notchback coupe.
For example, the below-pictured Lark two-door hardtop carries over the Avanti’s 109-inch wheelbase, doors and bumpers but has a more upright front, a much bigger trunk and a less-sloped rear window. A four-door “sedan” and wagon would have looked similar to the notchback coupe but given a four-inch-longer wheelbase and a pillared-hardtop design.
If this scenario was deemed too expensive, a lower-cost option would have been to more substantially restyle the Hawk. Picture a more contemporary hood and grille design, new rear sheetmetal with a shortened wheelbase, and perhaps a semi-fastback roofline. With an under-$3,000 base price, the new Hawk could have tapped into the Mustang’s market.
Although a facelifted Hawk wouldn’t have looked nearly as advanced as the Avanti, you could pretty much guarantee that it would have sold much better. That, in turn, might have given bankers more confidence in funding a redesign of Studebaker’s family cars, which could have been transferred to the lower-slung Hawk platform.
Also see ‘1964 Studebaker: Brooks Stevens hammered final nail in the coffin’
The key goal needed to be a much higher level of body-part interchangeability for all of Studebaker’s passenger cars. Instead, Egbert sought to make the Avanti a stand-alone halo car that reflected a pure and uncompromising design statement. Loewy and his design team certainly accomplished that mission.
As a design aficionado, I very much appreciate the Avanti’s brilliant, if quirky, styling. I also wish that the car had not been one of the final nails in Studebaker’s coffin.
NOTES:
This article was first posted on March 25, 2016. The current version has been updated and expanded.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Adamson, Glenn; 2003. Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Bonsall, Thomas E.; 2000. More Than They Promised: The Studebaker Story. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
- Foster, Patrick; 2008. Studebaker: The Complete History. Motorbooks International, Minneapolis, MN.
- Downs, Maggie; 2018. “Design and Conquer: Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti elevated him to cult like status . . . that, and his recipe for beer-steamed clams.” Palm Springs Life. Posted January 29; accessed March 25.
- Hull, John; 2008. Avanti: The Complete Story. Iconografix: Hudson, WI.
- Langworth, Richard M.; 1979, 1993. Studebaker 1946-1966: The Classic Postwar Years. Motorbooks International, Osceola, WI.
- Jedlicka, Dan; 2018. “1963-64 Studebaker Avanti.” Road Tests and Classic Cars. Accessed March 25.
- Niedermeyer, Paul; 2016. “Curbside Classic: 1963 Studebaker Avanti: Flawed Brilliance.” Curbside Classic. Posted March 20.
- Severson, Aaron; 2008. “The Unlikely Studebaker: The Birth (and Rebirth) of the Avanti.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted June 10.
- Strohl, Daniel; 2010. “Studebaker prototypes resurface.” Hemmings. Posted June 4.
- ——; 2016. “The Sceptre, the Cruiser, and Brooks Stevens’s radical plan to save Studebaker.” Hemmings. Posted March 16.
BROCHURES & ADVERTISEMENTS:
- aacalibrary.org (Antique Automobile Club of America): Studebaker (1964); Studebaker Avanti (1963)
- wildaboutcarsonline.com (Automotive History Preservation Society): Studebaker Avanti (1963, 1964)
- oldcaradvertising.com: Studebaker Avanti (1963, 1964); Studebaker Hawk (1961)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Plymouth Barracuda (1968); Studebaker (1953, 1962, 1963, 1964)
PHOTOGRAPHY & PHOTOSHOPS:
- Milwaukee Art Museum Brooks Stevens Archives
- Author’s photoshop: “1964 Studebaker Avanti: The more spinoffs, the better”
Way off the mark on many levels. The Avanti was never meant to be a competitor to the GTO or the Mustang (which didn’t exist at the time). It was high priced and targeted at the European Car market, the Jag XKE or Thunderbird, the luxury GT market, not the pony car market. Doctors and Lawyers were the target market. Originally, the Avanti was possibly going to use the name Packard or Pierce Arrow, not Studebaker. In 1962 the Corporate Name was Still Studebaker Packard and Egbert wanted to bring the Packard back. There are many things you mention here which are just way off. The car was only in production from April of 62 thru December of 63, not even two years. The closing of the South Bend Plant effectively ended the Avanti, not the sales number. It was a Halo car designed to bring in customers to the showroom. They never expected to build more than 10K examples a year. They build 3900 in the Year and a half of production, yes that was smaller than expected but that was also due to production issue. The Launch should have been 7 months later, they launched the car before they had cars in the showroom. In April of 1962, they didn’t have enough cars to hand out to dealer, that was the problem, the marketing was spent before the car was ready and available. You speak about a possible future alternative to the Lark and then show all of Brooks Steven’s work but ignore all of Kellogg’s and Loewy’s work on their Avanti Sedan, and Wagon variants. Lots of opinion here presented as facts……you speak about the “Mustang Market” It didn’t exist, South Bend closed down in November of 1963, 5 months before the Mustang was launched, nobody for saw unless they were mind readers how successful the Mustang would be and again. The Mustang was a low priced car, the Avanti competed against High Priced Buick Riviera and the Ford Thunderbird. What killed the Avanti was shutting down South Bend and only using Hamilton Ontario, they didn’t have production capacity for trucks or the Avanti or the Hawk in Hamilton.
Fred, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. If I’m reading you correctly, your assumption is that the Avanti could have carved out a small but profitable niche if it had stayed in production.
I had not read that the Avanti couldn’t fit at Hamilton. If the Avanti had to be built in South Bend, then we are back to the bigger issue of how could Studebaker have survived as a volume manufacturer. The point I tried to make in my essay was that the automaker needed to focus on higher-volume niches. That’s why I think they should not have tried to compete against the likes of the Corvette on price. Even if they had done everything right, the market wasn’t big enough. The Hawk was much better positioned price-wise to generate volume but its design was way too old.
Toward the end of the story I mention Loewy’s sedan and wagon variants . . . and suggest that the styling was problematic (I didn’t include photos due to copyright). A key issue was the lack of curved side glass. This is a good example of where greater component sharing between the Avanti and the family cars would have been helpful.
This is a journal of opinion. However, Indie Auto is unusual for an automotive website in using a scholarly citation method. I’d like you to know where I get my facts from. You get to decide whether they are credible.
An interesting essay. I rather disagree with the very last paragraph (just two sentences). It may well be true that the cost of developing the Avanti — a cost which struggling Studebaker could ill afford — hastened the demise of the company, but given the state of the company, that demise was inevitable. I for one am glad that Sherwood Egbert persuaded the board of directors to take the risk, and the company went out with a bang instead of a whimper.
Of course, as the owner of a 1963 Avanti in the final stages of restoration, I may be a bit biased.
They built more than 3,900 Avantis in a year-and-a-half,they built 4,643.
I admire Studebaker for what they did from ’62 to the end…some very interesting engineering things for a company smaller than AMC; built a line of trucks including diesels right up to the end of U.S production, and styling by industrial designers instead of “stylists” meant clean, simple styling and nothing “Googie”, which to my eyes have stood the test of time better than other domestics.
Not to mention that because Studebaker was small the UAW picked on Studebaker & Rambler striking them first to establish negotiations for Ford & GM. When the Avanti was introduced, Studebaker was just coming out of a long & costly strike. Because of obsolete production facilities & that their union wages were the highest in the industry, production costs for the Avanti were high.
Dave, welcome to Indie Auto. The early-1962 UAW strike certainly didn’t help Studebaker; it was apparently the longest strike in the automaker’s history — 38 days. According to Donald Critchlow’s account, the union capitulated to management demands.
Quite a few histories of Studebaker have pointed to high union wages in the 1950s. I don’t recall coming across any wage comparisons in the 1962-64 period; have you? The automotive division had gone through multiple rounds of cuts by that point and the breakeven point was far below what it had been rumored to be when Studebaker merged with Packard in 1954. Robert Ebert wrote that early projections for the 1959 Lark and Hawk estimated that the breakeven point would be around 120,000 units.
By 1963 automotive production was so far below this figure that the Avanti couldn’t have put Studebaker in the black even if it met Sherwood Egbert’s rosier projections. This is why I would suggest that what Studebaker most needed at that point was fresh product which generated high volume.
That the Avanti went through several owners and were built for decaded after Studebaker left South Bend is testimony to the outstanding design… even shoehorned onto the dated chassis.
I personally think the original round headlight Avanti is the most pleasing design… I’ve admired them since they were introduced. It’s on the top of my “wish list”.
Agreed. The Avanti has always been one of my favorite U.S. car designs from the 1960s. It’s too bad that the car hadn’t been built by a larger and more financially stable automaker.
I had owned an Avanti 64 R2 supercharged for 50 years. My Avanti was purchased from a bankrupt Studebaker dealership in Denver, called Jefferson Motors. Square headlite, high production serial number, of the 64 production builds. I thought throughout the years with the low production run in a year and half, my car would increase notably,it did not. It still is a good classic buy. Should buy one!!
Egbert was hired to diversify away from automobiles but did a 180 and went full bore on staying in automobiles. The infamous back of a napkin sketch soon became the Avanti. While Lowery and team was busy on the Avanti, Brooks Stevens was revamping the Lark and Hawk. Are heads spinning yet? The Avanti was arguably not the best move for a company in Studebaker’s position.
An important goal for the Avanti was to draw customers into Studebaker dealerships, something akin to what Corvette did/does for Chevy. But despite the Avanti pre-production publicity, the car’s slow production ramp up meant it just didn’t get the job done. When the much more modern looking 3rd generation 1964 Lark derivative models hit the showrooms in September 1963 the Avanti draw had already worn off. The press in general wasn’t too kind to Studebaker, but with 1953 underpinnings, “new” Studebaker models had become akin to putting lipstick on a pig and that was often pointed out by the press.
The Stevens 1965 GT Hawk design unfortunately never saw production and yes, if it had seen production, 10000+ sales would not have been a stretch. The redesign had a Chrysler turbine vibe to it. In addition the GT Hawk could have been made more luxurious to better compete against the T-bird and Rivera. The Avanti was a big risk and an expensive one at that, but it was not a failure, however it was never going to a high volume product. The stylish Avanti endured, almost unchanged in appearance for several decades after Studebaker’s product ownership ended.
In short, by the fall of 1963 market confidence in Studebaker was eroding and sales volume – for all models – was in steep decline. With Egbert in failing health, Studebaker automobiles lost their spirited champion and the board quickly moved forward with plans to hasten their departure from the automobile business.
It is true that Studebaker’s Canadian plant could support only a single line and thus the Avanti and the Hawk GT were pared. However, it was the poor overall sales of ALL Studebaker models along with higher costs at the South Bend plant that ultimately brought down Studebaker.
Robert you make some great points. One follow-up question: I’ve read conflicting reports on whether the Canadian plant could have also produced the Hawk and Avanti; where do you think is the most accurate source of information on that topic?
The Canadian plant DID produce Hawks including GT Hawks, as late as the 1963 model year. They also produced 1/2 ton trucks up to 1954. Of course, yours is another question – whether either or the Avanti could have been produced at the same time as the factory was in “high gear” with two shifts, just to produce the ’64 and ’65 “Lark-type” cars.
The Hawk, Avanti and trucks were all pretty low volume. The GT Hawks, as nice as they were in ’64, would need some expensive updating very soon, as you pointed out. The trucks, even if rationalized to just 1/2 and 3/4 ton models , were products not likely to see any beneficial volume at that point in very late ’63. The Avanti would have been a good “halo” car for the showroom, but with it’s specialized assembly and finishing needs, it would have been a production headache.
Nate Altman was already at Studebaker’s door with a proposal to take the Avanti operation off of the hands of the corporation in January of ’64. Considering what we now know about the plans of the president and much of the board, Mr. Altman’s idea must have played quite well to them.
Further to the point of low demand, by the time that the Avanti II was in production and made available to existing Studebaker dealers (late 1965), those dealers still left were often small and now even weaker, and not many made the effort to take on the revive Avanti offering (“a few select” ones, according to John Hull in “Avanti, the Complete Story”).
Very interesting, robust discussion here: But the Avanti was delayed between the prototype(s) and the production model in 1962, so much so that Studebaker lost an important showcase for the Avanti: Pace car for the 1962 Indianapolis 500. The Avanti did arrive at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May, 1962, but too late to be used as the pace car. 1962 Lark convertibles were used to pace the race and for the officials to use on the track as well as officials / muckety-mucks of the 500 Festival. I saw the white Avanti at the Speedway in 1962 on display, but I do not know if it was a production model.
I own a DVD about Studebakers in Indianapolis, and the final segment shows Rodger Ward driving his 1962 Avanti on the Speeday AFTER Ward won his second 500, so Ward won a pace car that did NOT pace the 500 !
That Avanti four-door sedan design is quite nice.
BTW: “pillared hardtop” is marketing gibberish. Like “freezer burn.
Sedan.
Oh, I don’t think it’s such a bad term. It designates a compromise between a full hardtop and a sedan.
I saw the term pillared hardtop in an article written in about 1971, which really surprised me. When I find it, I will post the link here.
By the way, I, too, don’t really think there is such a thing as a pillared hardtop. 🤪🤪