Discuss:
Studebaker started out making railway wagons, but by the 1940s hit on a classic that - for a while - had the look of a plane. By Brian Sewell
Published: 23 May 2006
"Four decades ago, in March 1966, the last Studebaker Commander left the production line and the last Studebaker factory - in Canada - closed its doors.
The oldest of American car companies, with its first experimental vehicle constructed in 1897, its first electric in 1902, and its first petrol in
1903, was based at South Bend, Indiana, where for decades the Studebaker Waggon Works had made everything from wheelbarrows to the trans-continental wagons that were used by Wells Fargo and Pony Express.Studebaker bought smaller, defunct manufacturers in Detroit and Canada, enlisted the collaboration of chassis assemblers, engine constructors and body builders hither and yon, and in 1921 gave up building wagons to concentrate on cars.
In 1928 the company merged with Pierce-Arrow in Buffalo, a marque ranked with Cadillac and Packard, and moved upmarket. The joint company was successful in racing, record-breaking, hill-climbing and escaping - a Studebaker Commander was John Dillinger's getaway car after the greatest of his robberies. Studebaker, with Pierce-Arrow, was even able to survive the disastrous years of the Great Depression.
This almost finished off both marques. Studebaker, bankrupt, sold Pierce-Arrow for $1m to some Buffalo businessmen who kept it going at a loss until 1938, and with the compliance of grudging bankers the car-maker soldiered on, clearing its debts by 1935, sustained by a reputation for rugged reliability.
Cars of this desperate survival period were so unadventurous in the stylistic idiom of their day that few buffs now could identify a Studebaker as a Studebaker - with one exception, a four-light fastback saloon with spatted wheels that was astonishing when it was unveiled in 1934.
Engines too were utterly conventional, but they developed independent front suspension, an automatic overdrive triggered by momentary release of the accelerator at 45 mph, a "Hill Holder'' mechanism that locked the brakes of a car stopped on a hill when its clutch was depressed, and windscreen washers.
Shortly before the Depression, Studebakers abandoned such identifications as Light, Special and Big Six, and turned to names instead - Dictator, President and Commander, not always in the order of engine type and capacity that one might expect.
In the mid-1930s the Dictator was powered by a straight six of 3.5-litres, the President and the Commander by straight eights of 3.6 and 4.1-litres. The Dictator was, not surprisingly, dropped in the late Thirties, but the President and Commander survived World War II and were back in production until the March of 1946, still looking like Chevrolets and De Sotos - but in that month the President was dropped and a spanking-new Commander was joined by the much smaller Champion.
This new Commander is known to every nerd as "the coming-or-going car'' designed by Raymond Loewy - but neither of these observations is wholly true. The boot and bonnet are neither the same height nor the same length, nor are the windscreens and rear windows in fact interchangeable; idiots spend time playing games with tape measures, but they cheat.
In 1946 the new Commander's nose was as lofty and all-American as any other low- to mid-price car, and the only real surprise about it was the wrap-round rear window of its coupé versions, made in four pieces of curved glass; some models had split windscreens of flat glass, others a single screen very slightly curved.
In these features and very little else the car was just sufficiently different to be a rip-roaring success, but it was not designed by Raymond Loewy. A Frenchman, the romantic Raymond, a Ronald Colman type with a chateau outside Paris, had been consultant to Studebaker since 1936 and had a design studio within the Studebaker complex; in this he employed Virgil Exner, formerly of Pontiac, and it was Exner who conceived the new Studebaker style.
But in its conventional nose he had missed a trick that even Raymond Loewy did not think to remedy until 1950. After four years in production Loewy, seeking to rejuvenate the Commander's design, remarked in his often exaggerated French accent, "Eet 'as to look like ze aeroplane.''
Robert Bourke, the employee to whom he said this, had designed an aircraft spinner for the Fords of 1949, but as part of a grille under a high nose; in the Studebaker it became the nose itself, the bonnet rejigged to slope to it, the grille below subordinate, sloping away from it, camouflaged by paint.
The front wings were elaborately reshaped to give prominence to smaller flanking headlamps, and at a stroke the car was what it should have been from the very beginning. Loewy has ever since then been credited as the Studebaker's brilliant designer, but was his idea for the new nose entirely unprompted?
Two years earlier the still-born Tucker Torpedo had been the sensation of the age, "the car of the future'', and it had a third headlamp precisely where Loewy put his spinner, the forms of nose and wings even more coherently related than those of the Commander. I suspect a crib.
This Commander is, as it were, the Commander. The outstanding icon of the various versions is the two-door coupé with the wrap-round rear window - the only body that in reality might momentarily be mistaken for a mechanical Janus.
But I think the most handsome of the bunch is the Commander Regal De Luxe Land Cruiser, a six-seater limousine on a long wheelbase with enough legroom to accommodate its silly name.
As for engines, all Commanders until into 1951 had the same lazy side-valve straight-six lump of 3,706ccs, delivering 102 bhp at only 3,200 rpm - virtually indestructible; this was then replaced with an overhead-valve V8 of 3,811ccs - but so sudden a leap in power (half as much again) unsettled the old-fashioned chassis and led one honest American critic to describe it as the worst-handling car he had ever driven.
This sensational family of saloons and open and closed coupés was replaced in 1953, but Loewy's new designs were too restrained and elegant to repeat the success of the first post-war generation. His Commander Starliner coupé was praised as one of the loveliest cars ever built, but Studebaker struggled to get the thing into production, delivery was late and, for the first time ever, the quality was uncertain.
Over the years Studebaker chopped and changed its nose and tail, stretched and shrank the cabin, called it Lark and Hawk, Gold and Silver, but nothing slowed the downward slide in sales. Loewy's swansong, the beautiful but notorious Avanti of 1962 fared even worse, its warping fibreglass body a deterrent to buyers who had willingly waited many months for it.
Inexorably Studebaker, the firm that in the last full year of everybody's favourite Commander, 1952, celebrated its centenary as a maker of horse-drawn and horseless carriages - and had assembly plants in Brazil and Argentina, Sweden and South Africa, Ireland and the Philippines - fizzled out, at the very end buying its engines from a Chevrolet plant in Canada. A hybrid Commander was the last of the line.
Had the Studebaker family, Henry, Clem and John, stuck to making wheelbarrows back in the 19th century, they might still be in business today."