(EXPANDED FROM 4/22/2022)
The 1963-64 Studebaker Avanti has been described by historian Patrick Foster as “one of the most beautiful automobiles ever to grace the road” (2008, p. 138). Even so, the premium-priced sporty coupe was arguably a commercial failure.
Studebaker could have plausibly extended its time as an automobile manufacturer by instead investing in other vehicles with a better chance of an immediate payback. Does that mean the Avanti was a fatal mistake?
Collectors have tended to argue that Studebaker was going to die anyways so why not go out in a blaze of glory? That’s a reasonable take — and perhaps the dominant one among automotive historians.
However, this narrative sidesteps some key issues about why Studebaker lost altitude in the postwar period. That’s why in this essay I take off my car-collector hat and explore the question of whether the Avanti was a bad business proposition. But first, let’s delve into the nuances of the car’s design.
A surprisingly advanced twist on an old design
To fully appreciate the Avanti you have to consider that it was based upon some old components, such as a chassis dating back to the 1953 Studebaker Starliner hardtop. That car was cutting edge when introduced, but by the early-60s its modestly updated successor, the Hawk, had become old hat.
As a case in point, unlike virtually every other U.S. 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.
The Avanti’s cowl also 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 and flat (go here for further discussion).
The Avanti’s designers — Studebaker consultant Raymond Loewy and associates Tom Kellogg, Robert Andrews and John Ebstein — worked around the old-fashioned windshield with some clever 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-built Avantis a wedge profile.
Whatever else one might say about the Avanti’s styling, it represented a remarkably clever attempt to update an obsolete platform.
The Avanti’s styling didn’t just distinguish it from anything else on the road — it was also exceptionally aerodynamic. 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).
Attention-getting styling was not universally praised
Maggie Downs (2018) waxed poetic about how the Avanti’s skunk works-style development in a Palm Springs, California rented house influenced the car’s sensuous styling:
“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.”
Chuck Nerpel of Motor Trend wrote that he liked the car’s styling “because it represents something entirely different in the industry. Not a rehash of something else” (1962, p. 23).
Others were not so positive. 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 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 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 gives the Avanti too much of a boy-racer look for what was sold as a grand touring coupe.
Some of these quirks were fixed after Avanti production was taken over by a new company. For example, the car’s front was elevated a few inches in order to fit taller engines from General Motors — which arguably improved the car’s looks.
In addition, the Avanti received body-colored bumpers in the 1980s 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).
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 Lark two-door convertible’s 109-inch chassis. That resulted in much better proportions for such a narrow platform.
The downside was that the Hawk’s snug rear accommodations were accentuated because all of the wheelbase reduction couldn’t come ahead of the cowl without hurting the requisite long-hood, short-deck look.
What to do? One step designers took was to eliminate the Hawk’s downward roofline slope over the rear seat, which likely bought 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 U.S. 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 costly European sports cars with its then-exotic front disc brakes, but an unsophisticated chassis borrowed from the 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).
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 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 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 fairly expensive. Like the Thunderbird, its price in 1964 was roughly $200 more than a Buick Electra — a top-end premium-priced car.
Perhaps more importantly, the Avanti listed for more than popular sporty coupes such as the Pontiac Grand Prix (roughly $1,000 less) and the GTO (roughly $1,400 less).
In contrast, the Hawk was much closer to the heart of the sporty coupe market. In 1964 the car was priced at just under $3,000 — almost matching a GTO two-door hardtop.
When the Mustang was introduced its base price was $2,368 — almost half as much as an Avanti, which listed for $4,445 in the fall of 1963.
Of course, a key part of the Mustang’s business case was that many buyers would select a variety of options that increased the price.
In addition, prices escalated once Detroit realized that sporty coupes were popular. For example, whereas a 1964 Pontiac GTO convertible listed for under $3,100, five years later a top-end Judge model exceeded $4,200 — only a few hundred dollars less than a Corvette.
Studebaker attempts to catch the sporty coupe wave
Egbert was new to the auto industry, but his instincts were proven correct that the sporty coupe market would grow in the 1960s. One could also argue that he took a reasonable gamble in pricing the Avanti so high.
The data that he access to in 1961-62 suggested that Americans were increasingly willing to pay good money for a sporty or personal coupe. Thunderbird production almost hit 93,000 in 1960. This was roughly 30,000 more than the top-selling premium nameplate, the Buick Electra.
Egbert projected that first-year Avanti sales could reach 20,000 units (Langworth, 1993). That wasn’t a crazy idea, at least in theory. 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 in 1963 and the Buick Riviera’s introductory year saw a respectable 40,000 copies leave 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. 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 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 needed a 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.
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) reported $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 (go here for further discussion).
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.
Meanwhile, 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 fake Lark two-door hardtop pictured below carries over the real 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 an updated 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 body.
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 car’s brilliant, if quirky, styling. As a collector, I would enjoy having an Avanti in my garage. However, I also wish that this car had not been one of the final nails in Studebaker’s coffin.
NOTES:
This article was originally posted on March 25, 2016 and expanded on April 22, 2022 and January 31, 2025. Dimensions, prices and product specifications were from Automobile Catalog (2021), the auto editors of Consumer Guide (1993, 2006) and Gunnell (2002). Production figures were calculated from data drawn from the latter two sources.
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.
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 1993, 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
- Automobile Catalog; 2016. “Full detailed specifications listing and photo gallery.” Accessed March 20.
- Bonsall, Thomas E.; 2000. More Than They Promised: The Studebaker Story. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
- 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.
- Foster, Patrick; 2008. Studebaker: The Complete History. Motorbooks International, Minneapolis, MN.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised Fourth Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- 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.
- Nerpel, Chuck; 1962. “Avanti: Forward! . . . Studebaker challenges their high performance competitors with an all American Grand Turisimo coupe.” July issue: pp. 22-27.
- 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)
- autohistorypreservationsociety.org: Studebaker Avanti (1963, 1964)
- oldcaradvertising.com: Studebaker Avanti (1963, 1964); Studebaker Hawk (1961)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Plymouth Barracuda (1968); Studebaker (1953, 1962, 1963, 1964)
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- Milwaukee Art Museum Brooks Stevens Archives
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.
Everything is spot on!
Some random thoughts:
Maybe the Avanti should have been marketed as a Packard?
Was it feasible for the corporation to turn all their cars into fiberglass body instead of metal?
At the proposed 4 door Avanti, I suggest the same C pillar (regardless of hardtop). It would be a nice sportier touch for the 4 door; generally I like 4 door coupes and 2 door sedans.
Maybe the Hawk, even with a drop noose Avanti grille, should have been offered with also an Avanti tail in both wheelbases. One single design (not even the Avanti second one), incorporating the design language of Avanti
And to add more on the table about the Avanti 4-door sedan, I saw this French website who have some photos of the Avanti sedan.
https://www.carjager.com/blog/article/avanti-4-door-sedan-fin-de-lignee.html
And they hoped then Avanti would have survived past 2006 but it wasn’t the case.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121019144543/https://jalopnik.com/130353/game-on-avanti-motors-hopes-to-survive-and-thrive-in-2006
I didn’t hit the translate, but I am curious. I’ve seen Avanti 2 door and 4 door sedan mockups from South Bend. They looked rather crude and I couldn’t really get into them. Then, there is this Lark/Avanti hybrid I/ve never seen before. Any info? The other ones, presumably from Avanti motors are gorgeous. However the rake on the last photo makes it look like the car has suspension problems. It’s a “what were they thinking” situationl
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”).
What Canada and Studebaker needed was volume, not variation. Nothing besides the Lark was produced in anything close to breakeven volumes.
Looking at the Canadian plant, the convertible had been built on the same line, which was also the undercarriage for the Avanti, the larger issue would have been dealing with the Fiberglas body panels. As for the GT Hawk, I believe they were produced in Canada, for export, so I believe yes doable, but more variation. There’s a bigger question for both the Hawk and the Avanti models, that would be the engineering changes to fit the GM McKinnon engines; that had simply not been done/considered.
In the end Brooks Stevens Lark and Hawk redesign work, all based on a common undercarriage, would have potentially brought volumes up to maybe breakeven levels, but by that time market confidence in Studebaker was gone after the South Bend closure.
Studebaker’s greatest champion was lost with Sherwood Egbert’s untimely departure. The board moved quickly to change course from ramp up to wind down mode. The 65 and 66 models were the wind down models, nothing more.
Was the GT Hawk produced in Canada or just assembled? I doubt the export market for Studes was that big and I imagine only a handful of Hawks were exported.
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. 🤪🤪
I own a 1963 R2, 4-speed Avanti and a 1964 R1 GT Hawk. I believe that both cars are stellar designs that still reverberate today. Despite the rumors, the Avanti was a well built and well-engineered automobile. The GT Hawk still commands attention wherever I take it. The value of collector cars of today is based much on their original popularity and sales. Unfortunately,these cars were produced at the end of the corporation’s vehicle existence and did not score high in sales or popularity.
Both cars could be considered timeless as auto designs go. They seem a bit narrow compared to the cars of the day. Slip one of early 60s BOP compact chassis under an avanti body, slap a Pontiac nameplate on it and it would give the TBird and Riviera a run for their money. The narrow Hawk body has a Euro look to it, so I don’t think any of the big 3 could duplicate their proportions.
Just a note: The annual International Studebaker (SDC) and Avanti (AOAI) joint car meet is scheduled for September 16- 20 in Washington, PA. 15301 (near Pittsburgh, PA). Over 1200 attendees expected.
I get the impression the Avanti was not necessarily a bad product, more of a classic example of corporate overreach, in not facing the reality of their current market position, and public perception. While I’ve always had a lot of interest in Studebaker, the Avanti just wasn’t going to work. Rose-coloured glasses have their place, but unfortunately it was only management wearing them, not the buyers.
A sports/GT coupe might have been a great hit for them when they were at the height of their game, or even around 1960, but by 1963 they had become basically the Lark car company. Classic Studebaker Presidents and the great Land Cruisers of times past were a fading memory. Since the days of the Bullet-nose, they had not really had a solid success. The ’53, while lovely to look at, was flawed in execution. I don’t understand how they could have thought having so little body interchangebility between sedans and coupes was going to work for them. But that’s what they did, and throughout the fifties Studebaker was limping, against increasing competition.
The Lark was a great save, coming at just the right time, rather like the Champion before the war, in offering something the others didn’t. Only until the next year, unfortunately. By 1963 the Lark had become a large compact/small intermediate. Now that could have been a very useful product to have; unfortunately it was still using a 1953-design chassis, which brought compromises other brands didn’t have. And it wasn’t what the market then was excited about then. Cue the Avanti.
With ten lean years behind them, Studebaker sadly lacked the public image for the Avanti to have succeeded. We never saw Avantis in Australia. Even though the Lark was well-regarded and a reasonably common car down under, the jump from Lark to Avanti would have been too much for the market to take.I remember Dad could scarcely credit Studebaker offered this in the US. Surely if must have been a Studebaker badge on somebody else’s product? No? It seemed nothing like a Studebaker! I can only guess how wide the credibility gap must have seemed in the US and Canada.
I imagine Stude management thought that if stodgy Ford and Chevy, the cars of the common man could sell the T Bird and Corvette both unique designs sharing little with the mainstream cars and at a substantially higher price than the regular models, they could also. You also have the R series of engines, which you could say were jearly muscle cars. If they somehow magically could have done the Lark on a new modern platform for the 58 model year they may, just may, have had a chance to have become America’s BMW or Merccedes. Their diversification was a good idea. This will leave them with a solid financial cushion to survive the inevitable boom and bust cycle a small independent manufacturer would face.
Good points, Kim. I’m trying to imagine a more modern chassis design under the ’58. Something with the side rails bowed out to allow for dropped floors – but then the structure atop it might still look unfashionably tall. I saw a ’58 President passing through my town last year. They’re a very nice looking car in motion, but I didn’t get to see it close-up, let alone in comparison to the other ’58s.
Lower the roofline some, or maybe stretch the coupe roofline to a four door hardtop – but you’d still have a narrower body than was customary by then. I think they were boxed in, whichever way they turned.
Your idea of them becoming an American BMW or Mercedes is intriguing. The early success of the stepdown Hudsons shows there was a market for a more sporting type of sedan. I wonder if it would have been feasible to fit a Studebaker body atop a Hudson-derived floorpan/chassis structure? AMC wasn’t using the Hudson parts. Then you could have low-built Studebakers running in NASCAR!
I just checked the dimensions of the 58 Studebaker compared to the 53 Ford and Chevy. Studebaker was the widest! Instead of going longer lower wider with massive unusable and unnecessary space stick with something the size of the full size early 50s cars. Bigger than the Lark, smaller than the gas guzzling dinosaurs, but with some pizzazz. Essentially invent the midsize car. This means a new body and frame, and you’re back to square one needing millions you don’t have and can’t get. Of course this is all hindsight, the past is unfortunately inevitable.
It’s a shame AMC didn’t buy Studebaker and sell the Avanti as their Halo Car. The design and development was done, just alter the VIN, change the name of the factory and they were good.
An AMC Avanti would have been a refreshing alternative to the Corvette as a GT touring car (imagine a supercharged V-6 Avanti in 1970) and might have kept AMC from sinking ‘me, too’ $$ into the pony car war, as the above would have cost less than designing and creating the AMX and Javelin.
AMC had their Javelin and the AMX derivative, which in the end were far more successful than the Avanti ever was, because they were more mainstream-like vehicles. The Avanti was a niche car from day one and the sales numbers proved it.
I like the Avanti, but it’s styling was – and is – an acquired taste.
In January 1963, Popular Mechanics compared the 1963 Avanti to the Chevrolet Corvette, Buick Riviera and Ford Thunderbird. Noted racer John Fitch compared the cars on the track (Lime Rock) and on the road.
The dated underpinnings of the Avanti showed through in the test. It wasn’t a true sports car – and by 1963 the Corvette was the real deal – and it wasn’t going to get people out of a Riviera or Thunderbird. It was basically a stylish body and interior draped over hardware that needed more refinement.
one of the recurring themes of “Indie Auto” is to continue to pile on Studebaker-Packard, A.M.C and other tragedies in the history of the automobile industry. While I profusely enjoy this blog, there is something as a follower of the history of motor vehicles and gifted journalists who write about it like the late Brock Yates and Karl Ludvigsen that I now see as futility. Studebaker was a dead auto / truck company after 1956 and A.M.C. after 1968, because (except for the 1984 Jeeps), any money spend that was not invested in the “core” product (in these cases, the Lark and the Rambler) were ego-driven “projects” that could not “save” the company. The Avanti and the A.M.X. / Javelin were wasted efforts that ultimately did not save their respective companies.
When I started to write about automotive history I decided to focus on what was personally interesting to me — which tended to be the misfits and malcontents of the US auto industry. In addition, from the outset my organizing assumption has been that if the independents had been better run, they could have helped the Big Three better compete against the imports — even if they ultimately died or were eaten by bigger fish.
My writing has been inspired more by the scholarly realm than pop-culture writers such as Yates. My primary goal has not been to entertain with colorful anecdotes and gearhead talk, but to help deepen the analytical quality of American automobile history.
I never expected Indie Auto to hit the top of the pop charts. That said, we writers write to be read. I will continue to publish as long as there appears to be a critical mass of readers who are supportive of what I am trying to do.
Studebaker and the Avanti could perhaps be likened to an ill patient who “sprung” the bucks for a really nice suit that made him look good, and admired by many – but the money would have been better spent on a heart transplant.
Keep on writing what interests you, Steve. It often interests me too.
Having said the above about the Avanti, l’m still glad the car was produced. Studebaker was probably not going to survive well in any case. And it is a more-than-decent car that enriches the story of the automobile.