The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company

by James A. Ward

Told for the first time this is the complete story of the puzzling decline and fall—in the midst of a huge automotive boom—of one of America’s most prestigious automobile manufacturers

309 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[David Fulmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title says it all, this is a history of about the last 15 years of Packard. Founded in the late 1800s in Ohio and later based in a sprawling factory in Detroit, Packard was the premier luxury automobile before WWII. This book has a too-brief capsule history of the firm, noting its innovations like the first steering wheel and gas pedal, before skipping ahead to the Great Depression and WWII when it goes into painstaking detail with the aid of board meeting minutes, memos from the Presidents, and interviews with survivors who were there before the mid-1950s collapse of the firm. Ward goes into great detail about the many different factors which contributed to the problems Packard had and which drove it out of business after combining with another struggling independent automaker-Studebaker. Packard faced changing tastes among the car-buying public, massive costs for retooling plants and designing new cars, a cheapening of the Packard name with lower-priced models that came out during the Depression, an inability to procure enough defense-related contracts when GM’s former CEO became the Defense Secretary, and finally they just ran out of money and out of options when they didn’t sell as many cars as they planned to or hoped to. The author is to be commended for his extensive research and there really is an astounding amount of detail drawn from the company’s records, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, and interviews. But I would say that if you do not have an obsession with Packard then this all might be a little bit too much for the general reader. Besides, this book doesn’t cover parts of the history of Packard that are probably of interest to most-the glory days of cutting edge design and well-built works of art being built for a refined class of motorist who would only settle for the very best automobile available. That era, I suppose, is what makes a book like this possible at all, for if it weren’t for the dizzying heights of the successful years at Packard no one would likely be interested in its calamitous fall.