AUTOS: New Team

Like a coach sending fresh players into a losing game, Packard Motor Car Co. last week rolled its 1951 auto team onto the bright green grass of the University of Detroit stadium. The company had spent nearly $20 million on the new models, completely redesigning them to get some of the razzle-dazzle of other auto makers who had been selling rings around Packard. The reporters who attended the first showing thought that Packard had its money's worth.

Gone are the square, bloated, inverted-bathtub lines of the old models. The new cars are slimmer and more graceful (see cut). Said Packard Engineer Jesse G. Vincent: "We had to fall in line with modern design."

Lower and wider (62 in. inside) than last year's models, the new Packards have a luggage compartment almost twice as big, and an automatic shift (which is optional or standard depending on the model). With nine models in three different price ranges, Packard hopes to put up stiff competition against everything from the Pontiac class to the Lincoln and Cadillac. To do so, Packard has its work cut out. Last week, when it had hoped to get its new models off to a fast start, the company was shut down: the United Autoworkers-C.I.O. had struck for higher wages & pensions.

Slow Start. Packard has been in trouble a long while. In the postwar auto race, the company was plagued by reconversion delays. Its first all-new postwar car was planned for August 1946, but the company was so hamstrung by production problems that dealers did not get the cars in quantity until September 1947—and they were not eye-catchers. But Packard kept on making them long after sales started to slip.

During the first six months of 1950, when the rest of the auto industry enjoyed the greatest boom in its history, Packard managed to lose $736,682. While total auto production went up 30%, Packard's dropped 20%. The company's sales had slipped from 13th to 14th place among U.S. cars, just ahead of the DeSoto and Kaiser.

Fast Finish? There has also been trouble in top management. Last year, when the board of directors began to question the authority of President George T. Christopher, the crack production man who had run the company pretty much as a one-man show for nearly eight years, he quit in a huff. Packard had no one to replace him.

After weeks of shopping around, Packard's 65-year-old Treasurer Hugh Ferry agreed to take the job temporarily. Ferry, who had joined Packard in 1910 when some drivers still carried ammonia to squirt at dogs snapping at their tires, was no production man. But he knew Packard inside out, and got the top brass working more smoothly. Dealers have been jacked up, the sales organization expanded and the new model hustled along.

President Ferry thinks that the $20 million which Packard has staked on the new team will pull the company out of its troubles. He hopes to roll out 13,000 cars a month—twice the production rate of the first six months this year—and sell 100,000 new cars by next July.