Forgotten Classic: 1953-'54 Studebaker Starliner——Sleeping Beauty from South Bend

One of our trusty local friends likes to use long dog walks as an excuse to explore Boulder's alleys* looking for hidden architectural gems and neglected classic cars. Sadly, my hound Watson and I missed one of his great finds after the recent polar vortex dumped tons of snow on our town. Isaac e-mailed these photos with the note "looks like a Studebaker." Oh yeah...

This is, in the opinion of many industrial designers, the Studebaker of Studebakers, the Starliner that Raymond Loewy convinced conservative Studebaker chief Harold Vance to put into production for the 1953 model year. Designed by Bob Bourke at Loewy Associates, it was part of an ambitious program to revamp Studebaker's lineup to include a more forward-looking product line. This effort paralleled work by Studebaker's engineering department to study features like fuel injection, transaxles and V6 engines. On the latter two items, they were serious enough to purchase an early Lancia Aureila, and to commission the design of two V6 engines (air-cooled and water-cooled) and a rear-engined prototype* to test them, from Porsche.  

The saga of this effort is worth a look because it shows how strong ideas can be sabotaged by failures to set sensible priorities and achievable goals, and in detail execution.  Before we get to the sad stuff, it's worth taking in what designer Bourke, master salesman Loewy, and old-line car maker Studebaker (who'd started with Conestoga wagons and moved into cars with electrics first in 1904) achieved.  When their Starliner appeared on the cover of Time in February 1953, there was no mass-produced car anywhere as clean, focused, or close to the road.  Only hand-built custom bodywork produced in Italy in tiny handfuls on expensive bespoke chassis made a similar impression...

It was the most striking American car to go into production since the Cord 810* from 17 years earlier. Details like the subtle indent on the flanks that echoed the reverse slant C-pillar, and the twin grilles flanking the low vee of the prow, reinforced the overall form.  One telling compliment paid the design was that advertising people didn't demand that illustrators stretch the proportions to make the car appear lower or longer; instead they just took photos and juiced them up with National Geographic colors...

An early sketch by Virgil Exner, who had styled the 1947 Studebakers, predicts the bullet nose that would appear on the 1950 models, and also the low, road-hugging forms of the Starliners. As Exner left for Chrysler in 1949, this has to count as a fairly predictive  idea. 

Bourke's design betters that early Exner effort in abandoning the famous bullet nose, and by opening up the rear wheel openings to show more of the wheel, visually lowering the car...  

In an era when Detroit was slathering its cars with chrome to conceal their otherwise unrelieved slab sides, and protecting their toothy grilles with giant chromed bullets, the Starliner felt like an exercise in Zen restraint. Two decades later Bourke's handiwork would be selected as the greatest postwar American car design in a survey of industrial designers…many of whom worked for General Motors.

Both Commanders and Champions were offered in Starliner (pillarless) and Starlight (B-pillar) coupes on the same 120.5" wheelbase as the Land Cruiser sedan. The Commanders were all V8s, denoted by the insignia behind the doors, and the Champions were sixes, with a circled-S insignia in the same place.  The Champion Starlight below shows the same clean lines and form-enhancing details, as well as subtle colors from the original set of two-tone choices...

Speaking of choices, that's where Studebaker management wandered off course in planning the new line.  Despite production costs at their South Bend, Indiana plant that were high compared to Detroit competitors, they decided not to embrace the Starliner / Starlight format for the sedans, making the Champion two and four-doors taller, on a shorter 116.5" wheelbase,. In making this choice they forced Studebaker to spend extra money on tooling for models that would sell for less than the coupes.  Bourke's team designed a 2-seater sports convertible that anticipated Ford's Thunderbird, but management rejected it when Loewy presented it as a surprise along with the coupes.

It would have worked, as the 2 seater below, assembled from Starliner body panels by a Studebaker enthusiast years later, proved. The proportions worked, even after taking a foot or more out of the 120.5" wheelbase, partly because despite their length, the Starliners were only 1.3 inches wider than the 70 inch '55 T-BIrd on its 102" wheelbase... 

The rear 3/4 view shows how well it worked. There's enough space in front of the standard deck lid for a top well, and possibly a side-facing third seat, instead of that metal panel... 

In that early 1953 Time article, Studebaker brass promised a convertible later that year to join the coupes featured on the magazine cover, and the sedans already in production.  After building a prototype ragtop, management nixed the idea over concerns about added weight. and  a resulting drop in performance.  One suspects they were also concerned about the money they'd already spent on new tooling.  The 4-passenger convertible below, like the lavender 2-seater above, was built by a Studebaker fan from a Starliner, and accurately reflects what we missed when the convertible was cancelled.

We also missed a line of sleek sedans based on the Starlight coupes. The clay mock-up of Bob Bourke's design shows how Studebaker could have used fenders and cowl from the coupes on the Land Cruiser four-door.  Note that right rear fender is higher on the mockup than on left, which matches the Starliner.  The mock-up also features the full rear wheel arches and thin door window frames which were dropped from the production sedans. Possibly reflecting concerns about interior space, the driver's side of this mock-up has a higher deck and roof,  Still, the form would have broken new ground for this category of car...

In an expensive and misdirected effort to have it both ways, Vance directed the stylists to  model the two and four-door sedans after the taller 1952 model. Why management even wanted two-door sedans, with Starlight coupes already approved, is a mystery. As the sedans required different fenders, hoods and deck lids, and different doors even for the two-door sedans compared with coupes, this wasted money on tooling that could've been spent on features the engineers wanted and / or sorting out production problems. This mistake was compounded when management decided to allocate only 40% of production to the Starlight and Starliner...

As it turned out, the new sedans (Land Cruiser above, shorter Champion below) were clean and tasteful, but generated nothing like the showroom traffic produced by the coupes. Studebaker could've easily sold twice as many coupes as they could build.  The company spent the rest of its car-building career trying to recover from the consequences of decisions they made on that 1953 line of  cars.

Not wanting to ruin a good thing, Loewy's design team under Bob Bourke made only minor styling changes for the '54 coupes, adding thin vertical bars in the grille, adding cloth upholstery options, and giving Champions the Commander dash panel.  A big improvement on the 1954 coupes like the Commander Starlight below was a stiffer chassis designed to address flex issues on the '53 models.  As with the '53 models, colors were understated, with monochrome and two-tone options... 

All that went out the window for the 1955 model year.  Studebaker management convinced themselves that the disappointing sales in '53 and '54 had been due to the Studey's lack of resemblance to, for example, Buicks, rather than to the original delayed deliveries, quality problems like chassis flex, and failure of production planners to plan to make enough of the Starliner / Starlight twins. Management instructed Styling to substitute a chrome-slathered catfilsh mouth for the Starliner's tidy twin grilles, slathered the car's flanks with bright metal trim, and re-christened the result the President Speedster.  Colors included the pink, black and white combo shown here, and something called "Lemon and Lime."  Studebaker had merged with Packard the previous year, and both halves of the short-lived combine were dealing with rivers of red ink. It might have been wiser for Studebaker to seek a union with Willys Overland, but that's another story...

While the '57 and '58 Packards, lightly restyled Studebakers with Packard nameplates, are often (though not happily) remembered, it's often forgotten that the 352 cubic inch Packard V8 went into a restyled Speedster, now called the Golden Hawk, for 1956.  Fiberglass fins and a new steel hood with vertical grille were grafted onto the shell, and trim, if not color choices, got a little more restrained.  With 275 hp, the car needed the disc brakes that Studebaker would eventially pioneer in the US (well, after Crosley) in late 1962...

By 1957, big fins were trending in a big way, and Studebaker grafted taller, canted steel ones onto the Starliner body shell, tucking a supercharged version of their 289 cubic inch V8 under the hood to replace the one-year-only Packard V8. By a remarkable coincidence the superchaged 289 claimed exactly the same horsepower as the Packard. The new Golden Hawk for '57 and '58 got simplified trim on its flanks and hood, and calmer color schemes than in '55 and '56.  The car fit into the late Fifties carscape without looking like a five-year old design.  In fact, it was still inches lower than most of Detroit's '57 models...  

After the 1954 merger with Packard failed to deliver financial salvation, Studebaker would commission its design staff to transform the wallflower Champion sedan body shells into the compact '59 Lark, which sold well for awhile.  And in an attempt to court the growing youth market that Chevy had already chased with the Corvair Monza, new Studebaker chief Sherwood Egbert* would commission one last redesign of the Starliner into the '62 GT Hawk, and late that year would preview Loewy Associates' final design for Studebaker, the Avanti*, which would set some speed records at Bonneville before disappearing as the sun set on Studebaker's fortunes.  Today, the Starliner from 1953 and '54 is remembered as Studebaker's high point.  It turned out to be one of only a handful of American cars judged important enough to get its own postage stamp...

*Footnote:  Studebakers designed by Raymond Loewy Associates were featured in our post for September 1, 2015, entitled "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie", which focused on makes  produced in Indiana. The Porsche-designed prototype is shown in "Max  Hoffman: An Eye for Cars, and the Studebaker Porsche", posted May 2, 2016. The Studebaker Avanti design, also by Loewy Associates, was analyzed in "Lines of Influence: The Avanti and How It Grew", in these posts for February 17, 2016, and in "Lines of Influence Part 2:  Avanti Antecedents", posted  here on February 18, 2016.  Sherwood Egbert's brief but eventful tenure at Studebaker is depicted in "They Don't Build 'Em Like They Used To...", posted  on February 24, 2016.  And the biggest Studebaker ever (as big as a building) is shown in "Vanished Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress, 1933", posted May 31, 2020.  Gee, we've spent of lot of time thinking about Studebakers…

*Errata:  The original post stated that the landmark Cord 810 appeared nearly a quarter century before the Starliner.  Wrong!  The Cord L29 design appeared in 1929, but the Cord 810 referenced appeared for the 1936 model year.  Like the Studebaker Starliner and Starlight, it still looks good today...

Photo Credits:

Top & 2nd from top:  Isaac Stokes
3rd & 4th::  Studebaker Corporation

5th:  Virgil Exner, on forwardlook.net

6th:  Hemmings Motor News

7th:  journalclassiccars.com

8th:  Richard Spiegelman

9th:  Raymond Loewy Associates

10th & 11th: topclassiccarsforsale.com

12th:  Studebaker Drivers Club Forum

13th:  Bob Doehler for Special Interest Autos

14th:  Studebaker Corporation

15th:  flickr.com

16th:  pinterest.com

17th through 19th:  Wikimedia

Bottom:  United States Postal Service