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.
#/media/File:1991_Avanti_II_sedan.jpg){kind=link}
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/