Ralph Kalal’s take on Packard raises useful questions but can be dogmatic

(EXPANDED FROM 3/15/2024)

Ralph Kalal’s articles on Packard history have had a boomlet of interest among Indie Auto readers, so now could be a good time to expand on a review I wrote last year. After reading some additional content on his website Automobile Chronicles, I still have mixed feelings. Kalal presents an analysis that by turns can be quite sophisticated but also dogmatic.

Let’s start by considering an article currently being discussed: “The Real Reason Packard Died.” Here Kalal (2019) made the provocative argument that the seeds of Packard’s demise were planted when it waited too long to ditch its lineup of money-losing, custom-built luxury cars. He estimated that senior models such as such as the Eight, Super Eight and Twelve may have cost the company as much as $60 million in losses before they were discontinued after 1941. This contributed to Packard not having the capital needed to keep up with the Big Three after World War II.

This argument makes a certain amount of sense — the upper reaches of the luxury-car market was dying off in the 1930s. In addition, Packard presumably could have saved at least some money by more quickly applying mass-production standards to the top of its lineup. That said, I wonder whether Kalal’s total loss figure is too high. I can also understand why management would have tried to hang on to a market niche that Packard had long dominated — and represented the core of its identity.

Kalal quite rightly pointed out that Packard couldn’t sustain losses like Cadillac and Lincoln because the latter brands were part of much-bigger automakers. Even so, Packard was also outsold by Cadillac in the luxury-car field in 1940 when its senior models began to share the same basic body as junior models (Yost, 2002).

Kalal insists that James Nance didn’t kill Packard

Kalal (2023a) was more dogmatic in other articles. For example, in a three-part series he declared that Jay Leno was wrong to argue in an Octane magazine column that “one of the final nails in the coffin [of Packard] was bringing in James Nance – a man with absolutely no experience of automobiles who came from a background of selling appliances.” In fact, Kalal noted, “Nance didn’t kill Packard. He saved the company, even though he couldn’t save the brand.”

I grant you that Kalal (2023c) makes the reasonable point that by the time Nance showed up on May 1, 1952 that it was arguably too late to save Packard. However, Kalal is clearly a Nance partisan, describing him as “the right man.” His articles largely focus on making excuses for the Packard executive.

Also see ‘1956 Packard booklet hints at how James Nance got too big for his britches’

As a case in point, Kalal’s above quote about Nance saving the company has a similar tone to Stuart R. Blond’s contention that Nance didn’t put Packard “out of business,” but rather that “they just stopped manufacturing automobiles” (2021, Vol. 1; p. 64).

On a basic level one could argue that Nance performed his fiduciary responsibilities to the stockholders. Even so, I would suggest that his recklessly ambitious game plan sped up Packard’s collapse. Indeed, Kalal didn’t entertain the possibility that Packard’s previously slow-moving and fiscally conservative management might very well have navigated the mid-50s more gracefully than Nance.

Kalal arguments aren’t always backed up very well

At least Blond’s narrative was grounded in an abundance of factual details. In contrast, Kalal could sometimes be thin in backing up his key contentions. For example, he stated that a tie up with Studebaker was “Packard’s only chance. . . . If it did not combine with Studebaker, Packard would be bankrupt – probably within the year” (2023c).

I can appreciate the rhetorical value of presenting a simple binary choice, but it goes against research by other automotive historians. For example, James Ward (1995) documented attempts by Nash-Kelvinator CEO George Mason to draw Packard into a merger. And Patrick Foster has argued that Mason’s successor, George Romney, “was in full agreement with Mason’s ideas” (2017, p. 124).

If Kalal did not think that joining American Motors was a real option, it would have helped his argument to explain why rather than ignore this obvious alternative.

In addition, Packard would not have been in such precarious financial shape if Nance had not been spending so aggressively. That included moving final assembly of cars to another plant and building a brand-new engine plant. As events would subsequently show, Nance was moving too fast on too many fronts simultaneously. Kalal (2023c) did not acknowledge this. Instead he criticized Nance’s predecessor for not borrowing money earlier in the decade to keep Packard’s lineup more competitive.

Kalal rejects criticisms of Packard going downmarket

Kalal (2020) strikes me as being on safer ground when arguing in another essay that Foster (2020) was wrong to say that “Packard’s problems began when the company moved into the medium-price bracket in 1935.  .  .  The new cars sold like hotcakes, but, because the company didn’t create a separate marque name for its lower priced cars, the Packard brand was devalued.”  

Variations on Foster’s narrative have been repeated so often that it has become a truism in U.S. auto history circles. Yet Kalal (2020) quite rightly challenged it by noting how all of the surviving luxury brands went downmarket in the 1930s.

Also see ‘Did African-American car buyers save Cadillac in the 1930s?’

Cadillac followed in Packard’s footsteps by killing its LaSalle junior brand in favor of a lower-priced Sixty-One series. Just as significantly, “the cars they would build in the 1950’s were direct descendants of those pre-war lower priced models.” Lincoln did this as well, Kalal noted (2020).

That was true to a degree. As a case in point, in 1941 Cadillac’s new entry-level Series Sixty-One was priced similarly to a top-end 1940 LaSalle Special but a notch above base models. That wasn’t a bad strategy because the Special had outsold base models — and the Sixty-One would outproduce the entire LaSalle lineup.

The graph below shows how the introduction of the Packard One-Twenty in 1935 and six-cylinder models two years later transformed the automaker into a mass-market producer, with output almost reaching 123,000 units in 1937.

By that point production of Packard’s “senior” models had fallen to under 6,000 units per year. On the graph below you can barely see the output of top-end Twelve models because only 1,300 were produced in 1937.

The focus should have been on luxury cars after WWII?

Where Kalal (2020) has steered closer to conventional wisdom has been in arguing that after the war ended, Packard focused on maximizing volume with lower-priced cars even though it “could have sold as many expensive cars as it could produce and, had it done so, would have realized higher profits per car.” This is similar to Richard M. Langworth’s take. He argued that “Packard could have reverted to type, rebuilding its reputation as a luxury automaker” (2021, p. 55).

That idea sounds good in the abstract, but I have yet to see anyone articulate how that would have been a sustainable strategy for such a small automaker in the postwar period. The closest that Langworth got to explaining how was to point to Nance’s goal of making Packard the luxury brand of a larger automaker.

Kalal has been squishier on this point, but he rightly noted that Nance’s attempt to move Packard back into the luxury-car field was made more challenging because the automaker would still be dependent on premium-priced cars to achieve adequate volume. In addition, he acknowledged that dealers “understandably” didn’t want the lower-priced Clipper models to lose the Packard name (2023c).

What Kalal didn’t acknowledge was that even if Packard had not been confronted by a tsunami of bad news, such as the end of the post-WWII seller’s market, the unexpected termination of defense contracts and the loss of its body supplier, Nance’s basic strategy would have failed for a simple reason: The automaker was far too small to field reasonably distinct entries in both the premium and luxury-car markets.

Kalal doesn’t address one of Nance’s biggest mistakes

All in all, Kalal has made a useful contribution to Packard history by shining a light on management’s questionable decisions about its capital spending. He has also done a good job of sketching how the auto industry — and American society — were changing before and after the war. His criticisms of Packard’s early postwar decisions strike me as reasonable, but I think that he goes too easy on Nance.

As a case in point, shifting production to the Conner Ave. plant in 1955 was a huge — and arguably fatal — mistake. That cost a chunk of money Packard couldn’t afford to spend, it restricted production during a crucial time period, and it led to quality-control problems that undercut Packard’s reputation.

Also see ‘Packard kept a bigger foothold in the luxury-car field than commonly assumed‘

I would go as far as to suggest that if Nance could have magically gone back in time and changed one decision, he should have kept the final assembly of Packards at the existing East Grand Boulevard plant. That could have helped to keep Packard’s financial situation from spiraling out of control in 1956.

Here we have an example of why it mattered that Nance didn’t have prior background in the auto industry. Kalal has been quite harsh in his criticism of Nance predecessor George Christopher, but I doubt he would have made the same mistake because of his manufacturing expertise.

My punchline: Packard’s decline is a more nuanced story than Kalal would apparently like for us to believe.

NOTES:

This story was first posted on March 15, 2024 and expanded on October 3, 2025. Production figures are from the auto editors of Consumer Guide (1993). 

Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.

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RE:SOURCES

• Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 1993. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
• Blond, Stuart R.; 2021. Spellbinder: The Life of James J. Nance — Volume One, 1900-1954; Volume Two, 1955-1984. Kindle Direct Publishing.
• Foster, Patrick R.;  2017. George Romney: An American Life. Waldorf Publishing, Grapevine, TX.
• ——; 2021. “The Executive might have helped save Packard. There’s a good reason why it didn’t.” Hemmings Classic Car. Published in January issue.
• Kalal, Ralph; 2019. “The Real Reason Packard Died.” Automobile Chronicles. Posted April 12.
• ——; 2020. “Pat Foster and the myths of Packard’s demise.” Automobile Chronicles. Posted Nov. 30.
• ——; 2023a. “Why Jay Leno is wrong about James Nance and Packard — Part One.” Automobile Chronicles. Posted March 26.
• ——; 2023b. “Why Jay Leno is wrong about James Nance and Packard — Part Two.” Automobile Chronicles. Posted March 26.
• ——; 2023c. “Why Jay Leno is wrong about James Nance and Packard — Part Three.” Automobile Chronicles. Posted March 26.
• Langworth, Richard M.; 2021. “1951 ‘Senior’ Packards: The Song was Over But the Melogy Lingered On.” Collectible Automobile. December issue: pp. 46-57.
• Ward, James A.; 1995. The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
• Yost, L. Morgan; 2002. “The End of an Era.” Kimes, Beverly Rae, ed.; 2002. Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company. Automobile Quarterly Publications: pp. 356-371.