Why the #Fastest Production Car of 1962 Failed | The Bad Blonde Car History

Why the Fastest Production Car of 1962 Failed | The Bad Blonde Car History A car of which design suggests supersonic aviation, the fastest production car in its time that was just barely produced over a year, the halo car that was supposed to free Studebaker from financial turmoil. We are going to be talking about the Studebaker Avanti and it's failure. Follow if you like automotive history. VW Karmann Ghia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKwdZ7GMqSY Volvo P1800: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As3mDhNDSjw Thunderbird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbOgDwM4hT4 Behind me is a supercharged Avanti R2. The birth of the Avanti all started with a gentleman named Sherwood Egbert who took the reigns at Studebaker in 1961. Let’s paint a little picture of the times. What was happening in the early 1960s? The Berlin wall was built, Marilyn Monroe serenaded JFK, the Bay of Pigs happened, the Soviets put the first person into space, Marvel’s Spider-Man would first appear in a comic book, the Vietnam war in full swing, counterculture was beginning to flourish, civil rights protests and more… It is famed that the basic theme of the Avanti was doodled by Egbert on the back of an envelope during a flight. I’d be curious to see his doodle. The goal of the Avanti was to compete against the other personal luxury coupes of the day, like the Ford Thunderbird, Volvo p1800, and the Karmann Ghia. AND ALSO to serve as a halo car for the faltering Studebaker company. You see, Studebaker’s sales were in a dire place and they needed a jumpstart. Designed by the man considered the father of industrial design, the prolific Loewy’s team included Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews, and John Ebstein. The group endeavored on a “40 day crash program” resulting in the Avanti featuring a radical fiberglass body plopped on top of a modified Studebaker Lark and powered by a modified 289 Hawk engine plus a Paxton supercharger if you so optioned in. I am not kidding about a crash program. Within 8 days the men had finished a clay scale model. Of the design, Lowey wanted it to suggest supersonic aircraft… That kind of suggestion was not affordable in steel thus they outsourced fiberglass from the same company that built the fiberglass panels for the Corvette. Upon it’s introduction in 1962, it was called the “fastest production car in the world” after a modified Avanti reached over 170mph with its supercharged 289 cubic inch R3 engine at the Bonneville Salt Flats. That wouldn’t be Avanti’s only feat of speed, in total it would break 29 world speed records at the legendary Salt Flats. The Avanti was faster than the famed performance cars of the time Cobra, the Iso Grifo, the Miura… Studebaker’s halo car was marketed as ”America’s Most Advanced Automobile” and as “America’s only high-performance 4-passenger personal car.” The Avanti was also one of the first of the bottom breather designed cars, in which air enters from under the front of the vehicle rather than through a conventional grill. The innovations and the performance of the car did not entail success, a dour combination of production problems, supplier fit issues with fibre glass, lack of marketing and delays resulted in cancelled orders took Sherwood Egbert’s projected goal of 20k Avantis sold to just 1,200… It would be just a year and a few months after it’s debut the Avanti would cease production in December of 1963. It would be four years later that Studebaker one of the United State’s oldest carmakers would stop making cars. It is kind of mind blowing that a car that was at one time the fastest production car in the world was produced for just barely over a year and technically a sales failure. The Avanti name, plant, and tooling were sold to two Studebaker dealers (Altman and Newman) in Indiana. The pair would reintroduce the Avanti as a slightly modified and hand built version by using leftover chassis from Studebaker and engine supplied by General Motors. These handbuilt creations had no connection with the Studebaker brand. The Avanti would be sold about 5x times and change states and eventually countries until it’s ultimate demise in 2021 in Cancun Mexico.