Jay Leno has a not very detuned Blastolene Special with a Continental AV1790 V-12Can't help imagining a sports car with a slightly detuned Merlin...
With twin turbos and fuel injection, has around 1600HP
Jay Leno has a not very detuned Blastolene Special with a Continental AV1790 V-12Can't help imagining a sports car with a slightly detuned Merlin...
Chicago to San Francisco via I-80 across a lot of prairie. Set the cruise control at 180 and go....Seriously, though, a Packard V12 sedan in the 60s and 70s would be the land yacht to end all land yachts.
A 12-cylinder Packard probably wouldn't be any faster than the Jaguar XJ12.Chicago to San Francisco via I-80 across a lot of prairie. Set the cruise control at 180 and go....![]()
A 12-cylinder Packard probably wouldn't be any faster than the Jaguar XJ12.
Studebaker went into receivership in early 1933 after overpaying for the White Motor Company, thanks to some major changes though by the end of the year they were back in profit with roughly five-and-a-half million dollars in working capital and over two hundred new dealerships. Aid from Lehman Brothers meant that they were fully refinanced and reorganised in only two years by early 1935. So what if Packard spying what they think is a deal make a successful offer for Studebaker in 1933? It means that Packard gain Studebaker and their subsidiaries White Motors, which brings with it truck and bus manufacturing, and Pierce-Arrow which was a luxury car manufacturer with a reputation of a similar level or even superior to Packard.Look around and along with luxury automobiles you'll see Mercedes vans, trucks, and buses. Going back to the 1920s, Packard also made trucks and if I recall correctly, at least furnished the chassis for a number of one-off buses. So: how do we go about (1) having Packard survive to today, and (2) produce the same spectrum of vehicles that Mercedes does IOTL, effectively making the two peers at a minimum?
I'm surprised Packard is still making the Twelve at this point-12-cylinder engines aren't exactly known for good gas mileage, and I'd imagine that the oil crunches of the 70s would cause Packard to drop the V12.
Unless of course, the name doesn't refer to the number of cylinders.![]()
The Packard V12 of this world is considerably smaller in displacement than competing Ford and GM V8s because it doesn't need to be huge. Packard V12s shrink from 7 litres to about 6 litres by the 1980s, staying there into the future. ITTL's 2017 Packard Twelve's and Phantom's V12 is a 6.4-liter V12, five valves per cylinder driven by four overhead cams, making 520 horsepower in the Twelve and 565 horsepower in the Phantom.
I'd wonder if Stude wasn't in such awful financial shape their being part of the deal wouldn't be as big a mistake as it was for Packardbaker. Or was that a product of "price warring" with the Big 3?With the price wars that destroyed Studebaker and forced the creation of American Motors - which is where I'd start, with all of the independents - Nash, Hudson, Kaiser-Willys, Studebaker and Packard - all becoming part of American Motors at the company's formation in 1954.