The Best Stuff In The Studebaker Museum Is In The Basement, Like This Avanti Family Car Prototype

I’m here in South Bend, Indiana because tomorrow I’m supposed to get some up-close time with the First Hybrid Motorhome, something predicted by Nostradamus in 1544 but never actually realized until now. South Bend was also the home of Studebaker, the covered-wagon concern that made the jump into automobiles, and they have a museum here. I had a few hours to murder today, so I went to the museum to extract every possible story idea possible from it, and boy, did it deliver.

Well, the dark basement delivered, because that seems to be where they stash all the really interesting things. I’ll try to show you all the good stuff I saw crammed in there, starting with a fascinating car — a styling prototype from 1963 that was designed and built with the non-trivial mandate of somehow transforming the Avanti sports car into a family sedan.

In 1961, Studebaker-Packard had a new president, and that president wanted an all-new lineup of cars, so to that end Brooks Stevens design firm was hired to work in parallel with Studebaker’s longtime design partner, Raymond Loewy’s studio, the one that came up with the original Avanti in the first place.

The original Avanti was designed with Loewy’s design team all holed up in a rented house in Palm Springs; Loewy decided to take a similar approach to this project, and two of Loewy’s designers, John Ebstein and Bob Andrews, were sent to Loewy’s Paris studio. They actually had to move to Lowey’s country house outside of Paris because the French designers all wanted in on an Avanti project, and there was constant Elvis music being blasted that drove the designers nuts.

They did end up getting to work, and in a remarkably short six weeks (it was 1962 by now) managed to come up with two new Avanti-inspired design concepts, a notchback and a fastback. Incredibly, both of these cars still exist, and both are now in the Studebaker museum, in the basement, shoved onto big car-size shelves.

(Studebaker Museum)

Both cars follow a styling mockup/prototype practice of having one door on one side, and two on the other, to show what both two- and four-door models would look like on one car. The two-door sides can be seen above, and here are the four-door sides:

(Studebaker)

The lower picture showing the fastback even features a proud Raymond Loewy himself! You can see some other trim detail differences between the two sides as well; for example, there’s a concave and conical air intake on the two-door side, while the four-door side has a convex cone to suck in air.

Of the two, the fastback one is stuck very high up and very hard to see, so I’ll be focusing more on the notchback, as I lacked a ladder and am many feet shy of being 12 or so feet tall.

It’s worth noting that this car was painted in what Raymond Loewy considered his favorite color for cars, a sort of metallic gold-beige. The front end definitely has Avanti hallmarks like no grille or air intakes above the bumper, and the recessed areas next to the headlamps appear to be paired sets of wide turn indicators/parking lamps.

The profile of this car also has a pronounced forward rake, in contrast to the Avanti, which had a swept-back front fascia.

But let’s look closer at the one we can see, the notchback:

That’s the four-door side. This has some crisp, handsome, clean lines and stately proportions, with a tall, upright and airy greenhouse. It feels formal and elegant, and the slight undulations in the beltline from fender to rear are quite elegant. I also like the chromed, thin pillars. It’s a very refined-looking car!

The two-door side retains the tall greenhouse, but somehow the windows feel even larger here. The rear window has an angled cut to it, making for a triangular-shaped C-pillar. It’s nice and clean, though I think the four-door side actually works better, proportionally. Also, someone needs to change that tire.

The front end features the Avanti grille-less hallmark look, with wide turn indicators doing all of the decorative work on the face. Also note the off-center narrow scoop with the Studebaker “S” set into it on the driver’s side. This sort of asymmetry was also an Avanti trademark, as the Avanti featured an off-center hood bulge in front of the driver.

There’s a slight forward rake here too, less pronounced than the fastback, but still imparting a sort of shark-nose bit of aggression. Not too much, just enough. I really like these clean, grille-free front ends, and while they don’t completely ape the Avanti, they definitely feel like part of the same family.

There’s also this odd badge on the notchback that I absolutely could not decipher – until I finally realized it said Pichon-Parat Paris, after the French coachbuilder that built these cars.

Studebaker was a company that was sort of notorious for everyone – including board members – wanting to be designers. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about everything, and while these two prototypes no doubt brought up a lot of interest and discussion, it was nevertheless decided that expanding the Avanti range to include more kinds of cars was not what Studebaker wanted to do.

In hindsight, I do wonder if a bolder design strategy from Studebaker, instead of focusing on the economy car Larks, could have given the company a market segment and niche it could have made work, and perhaps could have survived longer than the four years Studebaker had after these cars were built.

I guess we’ll never know, but somewhere out there is a parallel universe where Studebaker really leaned into the Avanti-inspired lineup, and we’re all happily driving Studebakers today.

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