We have had a burst of discussion in a comment thread about the Avanti four-door sedan (go here), so let’s take a quick look at that tragic car. In its dying years Studebaker had developed four-door models with Avanti styling themes, but none ever reached production. It took until 1990 for another firm, the Avanti Automotive Corporation, to add a four-door body style (Hull, 2008).
The “four-door touring sedan” did not give the tiny automaker the sales bump its ambitious new owner, John J. Cafaro, had anticipated. Less than 100 were built before Avanti production ended in 1991 due to the “company literally hemorrhaging cash” (Hull, 2008, p. 83).
The Avanti’s weaknesses were becoming more glaring
One could speculate that a variety of factors led to the quick demise of the Avanti sedan, such as inadequate capitalization. A suspect that another key factor was the weakness of the car’s design. The sedan’s revised greenhouse accentuated what had always been the most problematic aspect of the Avanti’s styling — an unfashionably flat and small windshield atop a tall and rounded cowl.
When the Avanti was designed in 1961 by Raymond Loewy’s consulting firm, his team was apparently constrained by the need to adapt a cowl and windshield design from the Hawk. As we discuss further here, the team did an admirable job of masking the obsolescence of the basic design, which was introduced way back in 1953. By the early-60s, design trends had shifted to lower, flatter cowls and windshields that were more heavily rounded and swept back.
Among the visual tricks Loewy’s team used to give the Avanti a more modern appearance was to surround the windshield with a chrome frame that made it look larger and more rounded. That worked well enough to help secure the Avanti’s reputation as one of the most advanced designs of the 1960s. However, by 1990 it was looking retrograde compared to the likes of the Ford Taurus.
Avanti sedan vainly tried to look more modern
Cafaro’s design team deviated from Loewy’s approach in two key respects: The trim around the windshield was ditched and airplane-style door frames that wrapped into the roof were adopted. In theory, that made sense given evolving design trends. However, in practice this gave the touring sedan the half-baked look of a kit car.
This Avanti is a particularly good example of the limits to updating an evergreen car design. I think that it could have worked at least somewhat better aesthetically if Cafaro’s design team had kept the windshield trim — albeit with a blacked-out option — and used frameless door glass like on the coupe.
In retrospect, Cafaro may have been better off not even trying to expand into the sedan market. However, the Avanti touring sedan does hint at a direction Studebaker could have gone in the mid-60s.
Sedan hints at Studebaker’s attempted move upmarket
The Avanti touring sedan was essentially a coupe stretched seven inches behind the A-pillar. The wheelbase was 116 inches, length 200 inches and width 73.5 inches. Those external dimensions fit within the “intermediate” field of the mid-60s, although internal widths and trunk space were less generous.
That wouldn’t have been a bad place for Studebaker to be if was intent on shifting upmarket in the mid-60s. And while one could critique aspects of the touring sedan’s design, its curved side glass made much more sense than sedan prototypes that retained flat glass (theavanti.com, 2024).
Also see ‘Brooks Stevens’s 1965 Studebaker Lark concept: Almost a baby Continental’
One image floating around the Internet is a proposed Studebaker sedan that had curved glass and the Avanti’s front bumper but what appears to be a somewhat taller body. In one discussion group, participants debated whether the pictured car was an Avanti or merely Avanti inspired (mfg, 2020). I veer toward the latter argument, partly because the car’s body reportedly would have been made out of steel rather than fiberglass like the Avanti’s.
I suspect that Studebaker would have had better prospects if it had built the Avanti out of steel and shared its basic body with the rest of its passenger-car lineup (go here for further discusion). The financially struggling automaker desperately needed a new generation of high-volume cars more than a stand-alone, premium-priced halo coupe that sold in small numbers.
NOTES:
Product specifications from the Automobile Catalog (2024).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Automobile Catalog; 2024. “Full detailed specifications listing and photo gallery.” Accessed June 24.
- Hull, John; 2008. Avanti: The Complete Story. Iconografix, Hudson, WI.
- mfg; 2020. “Avanti Four Door!” Avanti Owners Association International. Posted June 25.
- theavanti.com; 2024. “Studebaker Avanti-Based Prototypes.” Accessed June 24.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcarbrochures.org: Ford Taurus (1987)
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- 1991 Avanti four-door sedan. Photo by That Hartford Guy via Wikipedia (Creative Commons 2.0). Image lightened slightly.
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Raymond Lowry’s team penned several variations of the basic Avanti for an expanded product line. Several design bucks were produced but as we all know the Avanti died in December 1963 with the closure of the South Bend plant.
In reality, some of the Brooks Stevens designs for future Studebakers were far more practical than Avanti additions. The Avanti was intended to generate interest in the marquee and it did just that, but enthusiasm waned quickly when production snafus held back the flow of product to dealers.
Avanti was the right car, but with perhaps the wrong parents. The car had potential. The dealers who bought out the Avanti had faith and indeed the Avanti lived on for decades after Studebaker through in the towel.
You are correct, but Brooks Stevens modest redesigns for the 1962-1964 G.T. Hawk and the 1962-1964 Larks updates were hardly platform changes. By 1984, the Studebaker platform was seriously out of date, so it was switched to the 1978-1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, then switched in 1987 to the Caprice chassis. Cafaro’s iterations still could not match the chassis handling and compliance of a Taurus SHO. People who bought Avanti IIs, in my opinion, wanted something more refined than a Corvette. The 1962 Avanti was an update of Loewy’s 1953 Starlight Coupe. The look, however, by 1985 was dated and the four-door Avanti in 1990 was less successful than the 1963-1964 four-door Gen-2 Corvette Stingray concept. If I were in the market for a type of car like a fully optioned Corvette or an Avanti II, I probably would have wound up with a gently used Porsche 911 or 924. A car based on an old Studebaker Hawk or even a 1986 Monte Carlo for that kind of money had a limited market to begin with at a 1990 m.s.r.p. of $ 52,000.00. The m.s.r.p. of the 1990 Porsche 911 was $ 70,900.00. A 1990 Corvette ZR-1 listed northwards of $ 50,000.00. The real problem with the Avanti after your local Studebaker dealer went away was that the Avanti was basically a kit car. At least your local Chevy dealer could get parts for your C-1, C-2 and C-3 Corvettes and your local Ford dealer could get parts for the all generations of the Thunderbird ! My next-door neighbor who owned a 1964 (late 1963) Avanti and later a 1969 Avanti II had to go to what used to be the Studebaker factory store, Altman and Newman, in South Bend, where he bought his Avantis, to get it serviced and obtain parts (before Studebaker Inteernational).
Yeah, you slap a Pontiac badge on the Avanti and it would have sold in the six figures. As for Brooke Stevens’ Sceptre it was simply unaffordable. Avanti was done on a shoestring. I don’t know if not doing the Avanti would give enough funds to create a badly needed new platform, I doubt it. That leaves maybe a better facelift, eking another year ot two out of South Bend producing undistinguished cars. But they would never have given the world the Avanti.
My sense as well was that the Sceptre was far too expensive for Studebaker to have afforded. Whatever else you can say about the Avanti-inspired prototypes, they were more closely based on existing components (go here for further discussion).
There were ways to do a steel-bodied Avanti fairly cheaply, if less spectacularly. After all, the car was essentially an updated (and shortened) Hawk. In addition, if the entire Studebaker passenger-car lineup had been consolidated on one body, that wouldn’t have so heavily diced and sliced Studebaker’s meager resources on the 1962 Hawk, 1962-64 Lark and the Avanti.
Pool most of those development dollars and there may have been enough money for a full reskinning. But even if there hadn’t been, it’s hard to see how Studebaker could have survived without switching its family cars to the lower-slung Hawk/Avanti body (unless it had more narrowly focused on trucks, as we discussed here).
The same could be said for Raymond Loewy’s Russian adventure with the Moskvitch XRL project.
http://drivin-news.com/conversations/conversations-with-people-we-value-23/
https://www.hagerty.com/media/magazine-features/hagerty-magazine/from-russia-with-loewy-failed-world-car/
As a kid, I remember a lot of talk about the Avanti as a competitor to other sports and sporting cars. As I got older and learned more about the car, I came to realize it was built on some very old bones. It remained a rather nice car, comparable to some of the smaller British cottage-industry type of marques.
With the Cafaro acquistion, I was happy that the Avanti had come to my hometown. I was also initially encouraged that they were going to enlarge the product line with the sedan. Until I saw the sedan… I’ve long thought that the four door Avanti was the allegorical four door version of the Ford Maverick versus the two door version. While the two door Avanti was a clean, purposeful design, the four door felt like some sort of silly putty distortion of the original Avanti form. Kind of like the four door Maverick.
This is sad to me, as a sedan for the Avanti had been considered early on, but not realized. I don’t know what considerations were part of this Avanti sedan’s design criteria. However, my speculations may be wrong about some things. Were there upcoming governmental crash regulations that caused them to style the car the way they did? Even so, the car seemed clumsily styled, like some of the Soviet-era copycat of Western cars from the 50’s and 60’s.
I think it would be fair to say that Cafaro couldn’t have moved the car further upscale without a massive investment in engineering. Since the Blake era, modernization consisted of bolting the body to some variation of a GM-sourced chassis. Blake, Kelly and Cafaro were trading off of the Avanti’s mystique from the 60’s, while neglecting any modernization in the engineering of the vehicle.
Herb Adams (in the Blake era) had engineered a then-contemporary chassis for the vehicle, but that idea was scrapped. By 1990, the market for this kind of car was going to be limited and mimicking the styling of a 30-ish year old car was only going to get them so far. There were better choices for that kind of money, especially if you didn’t need the car to be “hand-built”.
By the time that Kelly had re-animated the corpse that was Avanti (ca.2004?), they were hanging the bodies on contemporary GM F-bodies (at first) and then later onto Ford Mustang chassis. Finally, the engineering was contemporary, but I think the world had moved on. Maybe the “Studebaker” Hummer-styled SUV would have been a better attempt at reviving the Studebaker/Avanti legacy than the Avanti car itself. The idea was solid, but it was executed badly.
George, l like your second paragraph about the Maverick, and l feel the same way. The roof line on Caffaro’s 4 door was too “older Stude”, and the retro look being grafted onto the much more svelte Avanti body – it wasn’t very attractive, and was a mistake.
l hope no one transfers “blame” for that to Studebaker. They didn’t do it.
The frame for the Avanti was directly from the Lark convertible (with an enhancement or two) and had the same 108.5 wheelbase, not a shortened Hawk. The frames of all Studes then were similarly-engineered ladder frames, of course.
The funny little protrusions of the Avanti body at the very bottom rear, left side and right, below the bumper, are hiding the ends of the unaltered length of a Lark frame. Yes, it’s kinda weird, but, l don’t know, maybe some one high up thought that it looked “technical”, which fit the car’s “advanced” image. The ends were then NOT chopped off those few inches! If they had actually used a Hawk frame, it WOULD have been chopped at a “proper” length, and the protruding ends on the production cars would not likely have been there. My theory and (good?) explanation.
l have never heard that a Hawk frame was used or shortened. Most literature says the frame basis was a convertible Lark as it already had the heavy X-bracing necessary for the support of a fibreglass body. It was already in production, and much better than spending unnecessarily modifying a second frame.
Stewdi, I get that the Avanti’s frame came from the Lark convertible. That made sense given its fiberglass body, which presumably needed more structural rigidity. However, it also strikes me as fair to say that the Lark was merely a shortened “big” Studebaker. In addition, the Lark appears to have a shorter deck than the original Loewy designs, which were introduced in 1953.
Why do I say that? Because a 1960 Lark four-door wagon was 5.5 inches longer than the long-wheelbase four-door sedan. Although the big Studebaker wagon’s wheelbase was shortened to make the Lark, at least to my eyes it looks like the cargo area of the greenhouse was not. Mainly designers shaved off the fender tips that had protruded beyond the original design’s tailgate.
In addition, the original big wagon was three inches shorter than the Champion/Commander sedan, which suggests that its deck was shorter than the Loewy coupes, whose basic rear-end design did not change much when they became Hawks. So if the Lark wagon’s deck was shorter than the Hawk’s, then the convertible’s would have been even shorter.