If you went by the above photo alone, you would get a misleading impression of the 1958 Studebaker. Yes, the colors are grossly exaggerated, but an even bigger problem is that the photo only shows the least weird part of the car.
The car’s grille was fairly benign for late-50s American fare. The trouble begins when your gaze shifts to the left or right — behold the infamous bug-eyed headlights!
Steer rearward and observe tail fins oddly arching from cross-eyed back-up lights. Those fins look particularly awkward on the wagon, where they jut out more than half a foot from the base of the tailgate.
On the sedan and wagon that extra length translated into more trunk space. In contrast, the 1957-58 wagon’s greenhouse was not stretched to match the longer rear fenders.
Meanwhile, if you thought the tail fins also looked tacked on you’d be correct. They were bolted onto fenders carried over from the previous year.
The overall impression is of a car that tried to keep up with the competition with cheap tricks that didn’t work very well.
This brings up a question that has perplexed the world’s greatest philosophers (and automotive blog commentators) for years: Was an ugly car more competitive than one that didn’t showcase all of Detroit’s latest fads?
Studebaker marketing stretched credulity
In fairness, the 1958 Studebaker was arguably not the ugliest American car to come out of the 1950s. I would vote for the 1956 Nash and 1956-57 Hudson. Indeed, the Studebaker looked more “normal” than its corporate sibling, the Packard (go here for further discussion). However, the 1958 Studebaker’s styling was weirder than the previous year’s.
The 1958 Packard had a Studebaker body with two eye-opening additions: a stretched-mouth grille and what may well be the most disjointed tail fins of the late-50s (Old Car Brochures).
To make matters worse, Studebaker ads trumpeted the brand’s “completely new luxury look for 1958” when the opposite was true. The 1958 models were only mildly updated from the previous year. Indeed, the Studebaker’s body was the second-oldest among U.S. passenger cars. That helps explain why ad images made the cars look much lower, longer and wider than they actually were.
The 1958s were trumpeted as having a longer, “lower-than-ever Flight-Stream roofline” and “Luxury-Level Ride.” Note how the bug-eyed fenders were minimized (Old Car Advertisements).
Studebaker wanted you to think that its family cars were competitive with the Big Three’s. They were not. They never had been. And they never would be without a full redesign . . . which the Studebaker-Packard Corporation could not afford.
Rambler and Volkswagen overtook Studebaker
The public saw through all this. If they wanted the size, power and glitz of a full-sized car they went with the real deal — a Chevrolet, Ford or Plymouth. And if they wanted something more nimble and efficient, they tended toward a compact Rambler or subcompact Volkswagen.
Studebaker became the odd man out. Family car output fell to roughly 46,000 units in 1958. This was almost 54 percent lower than an already weak showing in 1955. Red ink gushed and bankers threatened to stop financing Studebaker-Packard’s automotive operations.
Of course, Studebaker also generated sales from its low-slung two-door coupe and hardtop. For 1956 they were renamed the Hawk to distinguish them from the family sedans and wagons. Hawk sales were fairly modest. Even in 1957 — its best year — the Hawk failed to crack 20,000 units. Then in 1958 production dropped to 8,228 units. That was quite a fall from 1953, when the much-lauded design by Raymond Loewy’s consulting firm saw almost 80,000 coupes and hardtops leave the factory.
The graph below shows how Rambler reversed roles with Studebaker and became the biggest-selling independent brand. Meanwhile, Volkswagen came out of nowhere to outsell Studebaker in 1958 despite not having a national ad campaign (Hoitt, 2012). VW deserves a separate discussion (go here and here), but the Rambler offers a useful point of comparison with the 1958 Studebaker.
Efficient, practical smaller cars became wildly popular as a recession deepened. The “glamour,” “luxury” and “brilliant fashions” promised in Studebaker ads lacked takers. The only bright spot was the ultra-strippo Scotsman, which drew almost 21,000 buyers in 1958. That was 39 percent of Studebaker’s shrunken output.
Studebaker and Rambler: Similar yet different
Ironically, the 1956 Rambler’s body was similar to the Studebaker’s in its “real” width and weight. Both were forerunners to larger Big Three compacts such as the 1963-76 Dodge Dart but a size smaller than intermediates such as the Chevrolet Chevelle. But whereas the Studebakers were stretched so that they would look more like a full-sized car, Rambler kept its cars compact.
Just as importantly, American Motors directly challenged the need for “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.” The Rambler was pointed to as the ideal compromise between Detroit iron and a small imported car.
Since a 1953 redesign, the Studebaker had been stretched well beyond what made sense for such a compact body. Width mushroomed from 69.5 inches in 1953 to almost 76 inches in 1958. In addition, the 1958 Studebaker President sedan was 206.4 inches in length. This was roughly the same as a big Ford or Plymouth and only three inches shorter than a Chevrolet.
All that added bulk did not translate into a whole lot more usable space. Nor was the thin, long “cigar” shape very pleasing to the eye. Even the original Loewy coupe would have looked better if it had not been placed on Studebaker’s longest wheelbase (120.5 inches).
Even the Ambassador was shorter than a Scotsman
American Motors went in the opposite direction. The redesigned 1956 Rambler was much roomier than its predecessor, but it was only 191 inches long and 72 inches wide. That was a bit smaller than the highly successful 1946-52 Studebaker Champion.
In 1958 the Ambassador was shifted to the Rambler body. The car’s wheelbase and length were stretched nine inches from lower-priced models. However, that was still nine inches shorter, seven inches narrower and almost 200 pounds lighter than the Nash-based Ambassador of the previous year. Tellingly, the 1958 Ambassador was also a few inches shorter than a Scotsman.
One of American Motors’ accommodations to Detroit groupthink was to offer the then-trendy hardtop sedan and wagon. In 1958 they only sold 3,000 units (Old Car Advertisements).
1958 Studebaker was a phantom leg
The 1958 Studebaker was the automotive equivalent of a phantom leg. After Studebaker merged with Packard in 1954, a plan was hatched to shift the brand to a full-sized platform in either 1957 or 1958. This was part of a $50 million plan that would have given the automaker’s entire passenger-car line a “lower, longer, wider” look similar to late-50s offerings from the Big Three (Hamlin, 2002).
When banks balked at funding the plan, a variety of other options were cooked up . . . and repeatedly revised as the corporation’s financial situation spiraled downward. By 1958 only minor updates of the existing Studebaker body were possible. Even so, management continued to emphasize cars that were bigger, glitzier and more powerful.
The 1956-58 Studebaker family cars had a “Cyclops Eye,” barrel-style speedometer. It looked odd perched atop the dash by itself, so for 1958 an instrument cluster was wrapped around Mr. Cyclops.
Studebaker wasted money on a two-door hardtop
As a case in point, for 1958 Studebaker added a two-door Starlight hardtop to its family car line. In a way a two-door hardtop made more sense on the family-car body because it would possess better economies of scale than on the Hawk’s. The latter had a distinct body so it did not benefit from redesigns made to the higher-volume family cars.
One downside to adding a hardtop was that it diverted scarce dollars away from more pressing needs, such as a new front end that properly integrated quad headlights. In addition, a Starlight hardtop would inevitably cannibalize Hawk sales. Did management really want to undercut its pioneer personal coupe? That would have been ironic given the subsequent success of the Ford Thunderbird and Mustang.
The sedan-based Starlight two-door hardtop had graceful lines but proved to be the wrong car at the wrong time (Old Car Advertisements).
As it turned out, the Starlight sold fewer than 3,900 units. This was low even in the context of Studebaker’s abysmal overall sales. Meanwhile, total Hawk sales dropped 58 percent for 1958, with hardtops down a whopping 80 percent. This suggests that at least some cannibalization occurred.
Rambler sales soared by rejecting Detroit groupthink
Rambler had the opposite experience as Studebaker. Despite production troubles that limited output in 1956 (Foster, 2013), Rambler narrowly outsold Studebaker’s family cars for the first time. In 1957 the Rambler’s lead widened to almost two-to-one. By 1958 it had stretched to almost three-to-one.
One reason why was the return of the 100-inch wheelbase, two-door Rambler. Now called the American, it sold almost 31,000 units in 1958. More significantly, the senior Rambler — which for 1958 included the Ambassador — almost reached 132,000 units. This was more than double Rambler’s production in 1955.
The 1958 Ambassador sold three times as many units as the Studebaker President even though it had a higher price range and lacked a typically popular two-door hardtop (Old Car Brochures).
According to Detroit groupthink, Studebaker should have had an edge over Rambler because it offered the broader range of body styles. They included a two-door sedan, wagon and hardtop, none of which Rambler offered. The senior Rambler’s only body style advantage was a four-door hardtop sedan and wagon, but these sold in very small numbers. American Motors’ unusually lean product mix anticipated the successful approach used decades later by Honda.
Studebaker’s decline in the 1950s coincided with its emphasis on bigger and more expensive V8 models. However, management began to hedge their bets when the Scotsman was introduced in May 1957 (Langworth, 1993). This line of ultra-strippo models was priced to compete with imports such as Volkswagen. The Scotsman quickly generated almost a third of Studebaker’s six-cylinder sales for the 1957 model year.
Rambler American outsold the Studebaker Scotsman
For 1958 American Motors also attempted to compete on price with the imports, but it took a different tack. Instead of offering a strippo version of the senior Rambler, management dusted off the 100-inch wheelbase Rambler body, which had been discontinued after the 1955 model year. Detroit groupthink would suggest that this was a risky move because the Rambler body was not only the industry’s oldest, but a rather frumpy one at that. Even so, the American outsold the Scotsman by a three-to-two ratio and came very close to outselling Studebaker’s entire line of six-cylinder family cars in 1958.
One reason why the public preferred the American to the Scotsman could have been because the latter was too decontented.
Richard M. Langworth described the Scotsman as a “stripped stripper” because it had a “cardboard, plastic, and rubber interior” and substituted “paint where chrome was usually found on hubcaps, dash, and other parts” (1992, p. 37). The American was certainly basic, but not that basic.
How then did the Scotsman outsell the less spartan six-cylinder Champion by more than two-to-one? That may partly reflect a $200 price hike in 1958 for a Champion four-door sedan, which was roughly twice as high as the increase Ford gave to its entry-level model.
Another factor in the Scotman’s popularity relative to other Studebaker models could have been that it wasn’t as ugly. The Scotsman was spared the bug-eyed front end and weird tail fins.
What was with those quad headlights?
Studebaker head designer Duncan McRae acknowledged that the headlight pods looked “ridiculous” (Langworth, 1993; p. 99). “It was felt that that somehow we must come up with a vehicle with twin headlights,” McRae explained, noting that there was insufficient funding to redesign the fenders. “We only hoped to survive until our new small car could be introduced.”
McRae’s rationale was understandable but raises a broader question: Why did Studebaker bother to make its 1958 models bigger, glitzier and more powerful if it planned to shift to a compact car the next year?
As a case in point, why tack on large fins if you were planning to shave them off after only one year? By the same token, why give the sedans dual taillights similar to the Hawk if Studebaker was not committed to maintaining this design direction — and continuing to treat the Hawk as the brand’s high-profile halo model?
The 1957 Studebaker’s oblong taillights and concave fins offered a smoother transition to the 1959-61 Lark than the 1958’s Hawk look (Old Car Advertisements). Pictured is a 1960 Lark.
McRae also stated that the bug-eyed headlights were developed in a “short period of time available” (Langworth, 1993; p. 99). This is perplexing because the switch to quads did not take by surprise any other U.S. automaker. I assume McRae is implying that a crisis atmosphere at Studebaker-Packard made styling decisions difficult. Even so, it seems odd that the automaker did not already have a front-end redesign on the drawing boards.
How Studebaker might have avoided bug eyes
The bug-eyed look was not inevitable. For example, Studebaker could have moved up one year the planned redo of the 1959 model’s front end. Grafting the front of a compact Lark onto the back of a big Studebaker would have required a less stubby design. But as discussed here, that would have made more long-term sense than what they ended up doing.
Studebaker also could have taken a de minimis approach for 1958. To accommodate quads, they could have given their family cars a touch of Jaguar by adding inboard high-beam headlights onto the grille. Along the way the pouty-lipped bumper could have been happied up. This approach would have been cheap, functional and honest.
Click on image to enlarge. Base illustration courtesy Old Car Brochures.
Unfortunately, honesty was not on the menu for 1958. That was not supposed to show up for another year, when the Studebaker Lark was advertised as “an honest car dealing in fundamentals.”
The public had a reason to be confused by Studebaker’s sudden shift in direction. That shift stood in stark contrast to Rambler’s persona, which was quite consistent — and honest — from 1956 through 1962. Are we surprised about which brand proved to be more successful?
NOTES:
This is an expanded version of an article that was originally posted January 12, 2015. Market share for brands were calculated from figures listed in Wikipedia (2013). Market share and production figures for individual nameplates were calculated from base data found in the Encyclopedia of American Cars (auto editors of Consumer Guide, 2006) and the Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975 (Gunnell, 2002). All data is supposed to be for model rather than calendar years. In instances where data from one source appeared to be erroneous, data from the other source was substituted. Dimensions are from the Classic Car Database (2014).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
Hamlin, George; 2002. “The Last of the Marque: The Fifty-Seventh and the Fifty-Eight Series 1957-1958.” In Kimes, Beverly Rae, ed., pp. 622-635. Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company. Automobile Quarterly Publications.
The 2010-to-present Volvo S60 has relatively distinctive taillights but they culminate in odd center brows. Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
Retired Ford engineer Ben J. Smith said that he “wrote some very very strong letters to the product planning people and to Bob McNamara” when his manually-retractable roof design for the original Ford Mustang was rejected. […]
4 Comments
I don’t know if there is any breakdown, but what percentage of the Scotchman sales were commercial or fleet?
That’s a great question. The Standard Catalog of Independents lists 1,118 units for the “Econo-O-Miler” version of the Scotsman. Otherwise, I haven’t found any other breakouts besides by body style.
The 1958 SPC prodcucts take a lot of grief. Personally, tho I find them oddly different, I also find them appealing IF you allow them to grow on you. It would have been better to stack the headlights, especially Packard. The Packard fins are the most clumsy of the design features. Those should have been shortened and straightened, similar to Dodge 57-59. The Dodge also “tacked on their fins” but no one goes nuts over those. With stacked headlights and straightened fins, those cars would have been some of SPC’s most attractive ever. Studebaker could have stayed with their canted fins.
There is a technique is furniture making called “expressing”. Say you are butting two pieces of wood together, like say a chair back where it need not be perfectly smooth. To hide the lack of alignment, you chamfer the edges, “expressing” the join. Instead of just bolting on the bugeyes outline them with chrome trim blending into the the chrome beltline.
I don’t know if there is any breakdown, but what percentage of the Scotchman sales were commercial or fleet?
That’s a great question. The Standard Catalog of Independents lists 1,118 units for the “Econo-O-Miler” version of the Scotsman. Otherwise, I haven’t found any other breakouts besides by body style.
The 1958 SPC prodcucts take a lot of grief. Personally, tho I find them oddly different, I also find them appealing IF you allow them to grow on you. It would have been better to stack the headlights, especially Packard. The Packard fins are the most clumsy of the design features. Those should have been shortened and straightened, similar to Dodge 57-59. The Dodge also “tacked on their fins” but no one goes nuts over those. With stacked headlights and straightened fins, those cars would have been some of SPC’s most attractive ever. Studebaker could have stayed with their canted fins.
There is a technique is furniture making called “expressing”. Say you are butting two pieces of wood together, like say a chair back where it need not be perfectly smooth. To hide the lack of alignment, you chamfer the edges, “expressing” the join. Instead of just bolting on the bugeyes outline them with chrome trim blending into the the chrome beltline.