Andrews

Interesting interview .

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Reply to
RBK.
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Very good read.

It brought back memories when he mentioned the Milestone Meet at Carlisle, PA in the 1974 (I believe).

He, along with Bob Andrews and Brooks Stevens were the featured banquet speakers and they held the attendees in awe for nearly an hour after the meal. The highlight was a slide show with Stevens.

JT

RBK. wrote:

Reply to
Grumpy AuContraire

Most interesting reading. Wonder if that special order '53 coupe built for the Rodgers of Rodgers & Hammerstein is still in existence?

Craig

Reply to
Craig Parslow

I found this interesting:

One of the reasons -- a marketing situation that we had in our disfavor on the Avanti -- was not the car itself, but that, by the time the Avanti came out, there were very few good dealerships left in the country to sell them. We had a lot of back-alley service station dealers that didn't even have room for one car. By this time, Studebaker had lost a lot of dealers during that bad period leading from '58 through 1962. These were very slim times, and they'd lost a lot of good dealerships. So here we had a $5,000 car, and we had a bunch of dealers that didn't even know anyone that had $5,000 for a car. In other words, those were top G.M./Cadillac prices. So, that was difficult. The sales platform was very difficult. I think the car would have done better had it--unfortunately -- oh, this is so extensive!

Reply to
Michael - Roseland FL

That paragraph is not off the mark at all. According to the one time Parts Manager for Harry Forrester Ltd. who was a member of our chapter some 25 years ago mentioned they only had ONE Avanti, and it was ordered for a customer in Saskatchewan!! And he wasn't the only one of these what you would call 'conservative' dealers out there. I knew the dealer in Clive, Alberta, who sold Studebakers from a two-bay service station; no showroom. He would keep a few Larks on the front lot facing the highway, but that would be it. No way he tie up $$ with an Avanti on the lot, especially when it would have to sit out in the open in the blazing sun and airborne dust floating around. In fact, I don't believe he ever did get an order for one. There were many rural dealers like Clive Sales & Service who would not inventory G.T. Hawk, never mind an Avanti.

Craig

Craig

Reply to
Craig Parslow

Egbert had a big campain to weed out dealers like the ones you describe Criag. The other problem was dealers selling other makes and steering the customer away from Studebaker.

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Reply to
Michael - Roseland FL

That would have been a good 85-90% of the dealers out there when Egbert took over the Presidency. The golden opportunity was lost when those dealers who cashed in on the Lark in 1959 handed back their franchises the next year. Egbert weeding out small volume dealers may have been true in major urban centers where a major presence handling a single marque on a main thoroughfare would have been an asset, but in the smaller centers, it would have been corporate suicide. Those dealers in the small towns were very loyal to the marque, had a good customer base with the rural population, and if Studebaker tried that, those long-time customers would have been gone for good. There were just too many of those type of dealers out there to weed out.

Craig

Reply to
Craig Parslow

Craig, IMHO, it would have been better if Studebaker had created some new, Avanti-only dealerships in major markets. They could always allow existing dealers to do the service work. Had Avanti sales taken off, they then could have allowed select Studebaker dealers to tke on the Avanti line.

CYA at the meeting tomorrow night.

Gord Richmond

Reply to
Gordon Richmond

That would have been the best way to handle it, from a sales point of view. Honda, Toyota, and Nissan have since proven a separate sales network for premium lines works well. Studebaker had other major problems getting the Avanti into production as it was. Trying to set up an Avanti-only network of dealers was probably low on the "to do" list.

Craig.

Reply to
studebaker8

The real killer for the Avanti is well documented. Molded Fiberglass in Ashtabula Ohio could not handle building the Avanti bodies when the

63 Vette came out. They told Studebaker that the contract only obligated to making the panels so Studebaker had to figure out how to put the fiberglass bodies together in South Bend and lost over a month of production in the summer of 1963. Everything else was icing on the cake, but this was the real deal killer.

the service

Studebaker dealers

Reply to
Michael - Roseland FL

Various versions of all kinds of snafus, who knows now what is true and what is speculation. I had heard MFA told Studebaker they couldn't get the panels to fit properly and when the Stude engineers got there they were flabbergasted. They had to take all the panels back to South Bend and have their aging staff try to put the cars together, guys who had been fitting sheet metal for decades who now had to learn how to handle FRP. I had also heard about the pressure put on by GM to get the new Corvettes done. The realities of business I guess. In any event Studebaker had customers lined up around the proverbial block and couldn't fill the orders due to their production difficulties exacerbated by labour strife at the same time.

All in all, a damn shame - a timeless design and a great company ruined by so many elements working against them, not the least of which was Richard Nixon sitting on the board of directors...

Brooksie

Reply to
Brooksie

I think you mean Summer of 1962; not 1963. That would have been the critical time for Avanti to have been at the dealers; right before the restyled 1963 Corvette. Avanti was first shown near the end of April,

1962, and that was when the majority of orders were placed for it. By the summer of '63 all the production problems were basically ironed out by then, but too few buyers by then.

Craig.

Reply to
studebaker8

Reply to
Michael - Roseland FL

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