“If I can’t have you, I don’t want no-body, Baby.”
Click on pic for a better viewof this Patrician’s purposeful poshness!
One of my older chops in which I bring back a long-dead car company, Packard. Virgil Exner created a series of revival cars in 1963 for Esquire magazine, including a new Stutz, Duesenberg, and Mercer among others. This is a link to a page I found googling, with good material about Ex’s revival cars: http://www.madle.org/evival.htm
This is my contemporary top-shelf Packard, a supercharged V12 pillarless luxury coupe. Reviving the Club Coupe nomenclature, this coupe would be part of the Patrician line, a ‘senior’ Packard in classic parlance, and would be part of the broader twelve cylinder lineup known as the Twin Six. Twin Six refers back to Packard’s founding grandiose pre-WW1 days and it’s first twelve cylinder automobile. Bona-fide stars such as You Give Me Fever Peggy Lee, would flock to drive this newest incarnation of America’s finest car. Well, if she wasn’t dead and all. If you can find one, ask the man that owns one. Leno would own a special edition Big Dog Garage-built version with 700+hp.
Described as contemporary but not faddish, I’d say that it picks up from the large luxury coupes of the seventies, as if downsizing and fwd had never happened to the automotive world in the ’80s. The base photo was a last-gen CLK press photo, but not much of it remained, lol. I revived a lot of cues from various Packard periods, including the classic tall ‘oxen-yoke’ grille surround, forward-thrusting speartip on the beltline, the suggestion of 4 separate flowing fenders and the full length brushed aluminum rocker panels, so evocative of the last mid ’50s East Grand Boulevard Packard. I even made sure the wheel centers had tiny red hexagons on them, one of Packard’s oldest styling touches.
This is the car that would be polished slavishly and used for that special Saturday night grand entrance to an event you really didn’t want to attend . . . but you’d look, um, classic doing it. A supercharged V12 underfoot, sucking up Hybrids left and right, might swing the night your way. : )
Excellent. I too have had a long Packard what-if. Wasn’t going to happen, but it’s fun to think of a truly premium American car.
If they had survived to the 1980s, Packard, like all exclusive luxury brands, would be prospering with the 1% today. Ask the man who owns one:
That would make a great Lincoln right now.
Agreed. Or Chrysler could do an Imperial based on the 300/Challenger platform.
Looks a lot like the Lincoln Continentals & the last of the Imperials in overall shape.
I’m seeing a lot of 63 > 65 Riv in that image
Oh, if only…if only!
Hey look a retro Lincoln Mark!
Not a good look aping a Lido lounge room
Looks obsolete from the start. I don’t like it. (I also didn’t like Exner’s Duesenberg design) Too much a reminder of the bad period of Americans cars. Newer has to be very aerodynamic, just not *look* it. This is a brick. Maybe good as a Buick, but Packard, no way.
For a horrible what-if (rather, what-IS), go to Packard’s current website. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Packard+Motor+Company
Urg.
That looks like some 1990 GM W-body prototype reject with a good dose of Chrysler LH-rejected concept thrown in in the rear.
Realllllllly BAD.
Casey, these guys REALLLLLLY need your services!
Beautiful, just gorgeous. Between your art and the song quote I had to force myself to snap out of that misty-eyed “oh, what we’ve lost” feeling…
I like the idea behind it, but this is just outdated and a little too derivative of the Mark series. I really like the works of Exner and his son, and I think they’re both brilliant, but they both got hung up back somewhere and never progressed past 1975. If that. But keep them coming anyway!
Where’s the Opera Windows? Is the rear window diamond shaped as well?