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This Car Could Not Save Studebaker. It’s …
The Avanti: 1962-2006
The Avanti is a personal luxury car initially manufactured and marketed by Studebaker, then later by others. It was a halo car for Studebaker, marketed as “America’s only four-passenger high-performance personal car.” Studebaker’s advertising agency provided the name of the car, which means “forward” or “onward” in Italian.
Studebaker Avanti 1962-1963
In 1962 Studebaker was in dire financial straits. Despite the ill-advised merger with Packard eight years earlier, their cars simply weren’t selling and they needed a halo car to draw buyers into showrooms hopefully to purchase a Lark or Wagonaire. The Avanti was that car, developed at the direction of Studebaker president Sherwood Egbert. Egbert allegedly doodled the radical design on the back of an envelope during an airplane flight to California after buying all the automotive magazines he could find at Chicago O’Hare’s newsstands. As cliche as that may sound, it was their answer to the Ford Thunderbird and an attempt to improve Studebaker’s sagging performance.
Sequestered in a rented desert ranch house near Palm Springs, California in order to shield them from distractions and interference by Studebaker executives, the car was designed in 40 days by industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s team, primarily Bob Andrews, John Ebstein and Tom Kellog. Astounded at the clarity and advanced looks of Egbert’s drawings, he gave his team certain general instructions such as a Coke-bottle shape was a must, and the car was to have a “wedgy silhouette.” In a week the team had developed a ⅛ scale clay model of the car, which Lowey took back to Egbert. Avanti featured a fiberglass body because the design would have been too costly and near-impossible at the time to stamp out of steel, plus a fiberglass body could be tooled up much more quickly than a traditional steel body. This was important because Egbert was in a time crunch to get the car completedas Studebaker had been lurching towards insolvency ever since the Packard merger. Time and budget constraints also forced the use of an existing Studebaker frame, a modified and shortened Lark model.
Loewy was no stranger to Studebaker, having previously worked on the company’s elegant Starlight coupe some years before, and he envisioned a low-slung long hood and short rear deck semi-fastback coupe a couple of years before the Ford Mustang would use that format to great effect. In a 2020 article, Motor Trend magazine called it “Raymond Lowey’s Love Letter to Forever.” A grill-less nose and wasp-waisted curvature to the rear fenders hinted at the supersonic military fighters of the day. The power bulge that ended up on the hood was described by Lowey as the “sight of a gun” that would draw the eye towards “where the roadway would bend with the horizon.” Lowey personally designed the wheel openings to have a shape reminiscent of the flight trajectory of the Sputnik satellite. He also knew that Egbert loved flying, so he designed an aircraft-style cockpit. In eight days the designers had finished a clay scale model with two different sides: one a 2-place sports car, the other a four-seat GT coupe. The young stylist from California, Tom Kellog, felt that the four-seat GT was the better design, and is what ultimately became the Avanti.
The Avanti was introduced simultaneously both at the 1962 New York International Automobile Show and at Studebaker’s annual shareholders meeting. Rodger Ward, the 1962 Indianapolis 500 winner, received an Avanti as part of his prize package, making him the first official Avanti owner. The fiberglass bodywork was initially outsourced to the Molded Fiberglass Body corporation in Ashtabula, Ohio, the same company that had built the original Chevrolet Corvette body. Studebaker attempted to make its own fiberglass Avanti bodies in-house to increase production, but there were fit and finish issues with both their in-house bodies and the ones from Molded Fiberglass Body, resulting in delays and canceled orders. Most of those customers went on to buy Corvettes or other sporty cars in a similar price range. While the car was well-received at the New York show, the roll-out met with some serious problems as the more than 100 fiberglass components in the body meant that both Molded Fiberglass Body and Studebaker had great difficulty meeting the necessary tolerances. Because of this, Studebaker did not assemble enough cars to make a serious dent in showrooms for the 1962 model year, having brought the car out for sale in the late fall. 1963 would be a better year, with more Avantis being sold. A benefit of the fiberglass body was a lighter (by the standards of the day) 3,700 lb. car. With no conventional grill, it was one of the first “bottom breather” cars that took in air from under the front of the vehicle rather than above the front bumper. This design would become much more common about twenty years later.
1963 Studebaker Avanti R2
Three models were available, an R1 with a 289 cubic inch, 240 HP Studebaker “Jet Thrust” V8 with a ¾ race high-lift camshaft, dual-breaker distributor, four-barrel carb and dual exhaust, and the R2 supercharged model that pushed the output of the 289 to 290 HP. R2 models came without air conditioning as the Paxton supercharger fitted under the hood left no room for an A/C compressor.
The ultra-rare supercharged R3 model squeezed 335 ponies out of a 304 cubic inch mill, but only nine of these were ever built. An experimental non-supercharged, dual-carbureted R4 model with 280 HP and a twin-supercharged, fuel injected R5 with a magneto ignition and an astounding for the time 575 HP never made it into production. Each of these engines were tuned by race driver Andy Granatelli, who headed up Paxton which Studebaker had recently acquired. This gave the engines a serious performance boost over their standard Studebaker counterparts. Base R1 models could hit 60 MPH in 9.5 seconds, lively for the day, but the R2 model cut 2 seconds off that time. This placed the R2 within striking distance of a 327-powered Corvette and was quicker than both Ford‘s and Buick‘s personal luxury coupes the Thunderbird and Riviera, both in the same price range as the Avanti. Studebaker took the car to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where despite the lack of wind-tunnel testing the body proved to be highly aerodynamic. It smashed 29 production car records and posted a top speed of 170 MPH in the flying mile with the company’s president behind the wheel. A modified version topped out at 196 MPH, a staggering speed for an early 1960s production car.
The base transmission was a Studebaker 3-speed manual, but few Avantis were made with this gearbox. Most were built using either a Studebaker 4-speed manual or a Borg-Warner automatic. It featured British Dunlop-designed front disc brakes made under license by Bendix and drum brakes in the rear. Options included power steering, power windows, a re-branded Delco AM or AM/FM radios, tinted glass, left and/or right “Stratovue” external mirrors, and a host of other convenience items as well as advanced safety features such as a built-in roll bar, a padded interior and door latches that became structural body members when closed. This was pre-Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed that sensationalized Detroit’s perceived safety failings, and neither automakers or customers were all that interested in safety features. All 1963 interiors were two-tone vinyl with a light tan “fawn” color on top and either black, turquoise, orange, a dark brown “elk” or red on the bottom. The carpets were tuxedo “salt and pepper” style like the first-generation Corvette, but not sourced from GM.
In 1964 some features were added such as square headlight glass lenses, replacing the old round lenses and a tilt steering wheel. The two-tone interior became a single color and the tan painted dashboard and console was replaced with woodgrain vinyl applique. The tan steering wheel got the same woodgrain treatment. The bucket seats, thinly disguised copies of Alfa Romeo bucket seats, got thicker seatbacks in the last few hundred cars. A slightly bored-out R3 engine was added with its Carter AFB carb enclosed in an airbox for better performance, but only fitted to the last nine cars off the assembly line in December of 1963.
Changes in the production line produced some so-called 1963 ½ models with a single-color 1964 interior with 1963 round headlights. A few obscure models were sent to Nevada for something called the “Las Vegas Driveaway.” Instead of vinyl applique on the dashboard, console and steering wheel these items were painted black as early vinyl applique would peel excessively in the Nevada heat. The move was made to avoid angry customers. One wonders how customers felt about gripping a black steering wheel on a 115-degree Las Vegas summer day in a supercharged R2 model with no air conditioning.
Egbert had planned to sell 20,000 Avantis in 1962, but Studebaker only managed to build 1,200. By 1964 the public was well aware of Studebaker‘s financial woes and decided to stay away from a car company with no future, and as a result sales were slashed by 75 percent. This was the first death knell for Studebaker. The nature of small-volume production is that few Avantis from this era are exactly alike. Six exterior colors and different option combinations means that the cars were nearly all were semi-personalized to their original owners. The generally accepted number of Studebaker Avantis built is 4,643. Fewer than 3,000 originals remain, perhaps as few as 2,600. The fiberglass bodies have helped with attrition rates, but the chassis and other metal components exposed to the air and road salts means that they are not completely immune to rust.
Studebaker closed the South Bend, Indiana factory just before Christmas 1963, and Avanti was one of the casualties. Competition Press reported that “Avantis will no longer be manufactured and contrary to the reports that there are thousands gathering dust in South Bend warehouses, Studebaker has only five Avantis left. Dealers have about 2,500 and 1,600 have been sold since its introduction.” For comparison, Chevrolet sold 23,631 Corvettes that year. Studebaker continued to build Larks and a few other models in Canada until 1966, when production ceased forever. However, unlike other automotive swan songs the Avanti would survive the death of its parent company and live on again.
Avanti II (RQA & RQB) 1967-1986
The Avanti was too good of a car to die with Studebaker, and the name, tooling and plant space were sold to two South Bend Studebaker dealers, Nate Altman and Leo Newman. Altman approached every carmaker in the US with his idea of reviving the Avanti, but had no takers, so he and Newman decided to build it themselves at the South Bend plant. Incorporating as the Avanti Motor Corporation and hiring former Studebaker chief engineer Eugene Hardig to occupy the same position he held at Studebaker, they built a handful of slightly modified hand-built versions named Avanti II using leftover Studebaker parts and GM engines within months of opening the plant again, with no connection to Studebaker. There was also talk of re-introducing this version of the Avanti into Studebaker showrooms in 1965 and 1966, but this never came to fruition.
The Avanti II was essentially a hand-built 1964 model without the distinctive rake to the front end of the Studebaker models to accommodate the slightly taller 300 HP 327 cubic inch Corvette engine. These have come to be known as “RQA” cars due to the serial numbers being prefixed with the letters RQA. These became highly personalized cars, as buyers had nearly an unlimited number of paint colors and interior fabrics to choose from. By 1969 300 Avanti IIs had been sold, at a price 50% higher than what Studebaker had been asking just a few years before.
The “RQB” cars from 1970 to 1982, again because of the serial number prefix, can be identified by their high-backed bucket seats with built-in headrests as opposed to the older Alfa Romeo-type buckets. As time went on the Avanti II, like many personal luxury cars from the Big Three, became less performance-oriented and more luxury-oriented as government emissions-control regulations strangled the horsepower of the Chevrolet V8s that powered the car.
Over the years the engine bay also housed a Chevrolet 400 and a small-block 350. In 1981 after the second Energy Crisis a Chevrolet 305 with electronic engine controls was installed, producing only 155 HP mated to a GM Turbo-Hydromatic 350 automatic transmission. In the 1980s, hand-building an Avanti II required 10 to 12 weeks depending on whether or not a special paint color or upholstery color was ordered. From 1963 to 1985 the Avanti II was built on the Studebaker-designed chassis.
In October of 1982 real-estate developer and self-proclaimed “car nut” Stephen Blake bought the rights to the Avanti II, and the state of Indiana guaranteed $1.9 million in loans as part of the package. The car had been built the same with only minor modifications besides engine and transmission since the mid-1960s, so Blake and his team started updating and modernizing the while keeping the same basic body design, dubbed Mark II Avanti. A convertible body design with an all-new and lighter backbone chassis designed by former Pontiac engineer Herb Adams was proposed, using a torque tube and a 1985 Corvette aluminum rear end and independent suspension. Those plans were shelved in favor of placing the body on an existing GM G-body Monte Carlo chassis as it could easily accept Chevrolet V8s. Newly approved rectangular headlights with matching openings and plastic body-colored bumpers were also introduced, highlighting the dramatic appearance of the car.
Even with the GM-sourced parts, each Avanti still took eight to ten weeks to hand-build. A legitimate dealer network was established, and a promotional stunt in 1983 saw the Avanti (with II removed from the badge) run in the 24 Hours of Daytona, where it survived the race to finish 27th overall. Blake changed the paint that the plant was using to Ditzler Deltron urethane paint to give the cars a richer and deeper finish. However, it was discovered that the Ditzler Deltron paint would not adhere to the fiberglass Avanti body panels and an entire year’s worth of production had to be re-painted under warranty. Just a few years after introducing the Mark II the company declared bankruptcy and Blake resigned in February of 1986. No cars were built that year.
The Avanti Motor Company was then purchased by Michael Eugene Kelly, re-christened the New Avanti Motor Corporation, and South Bend production re-started. He introduced a new model called the Luxury Sport Coupe (LSC) and had produced about 90 cars by early 1987. Kelly announced that he was looking for production facilities for a new four-door version of the Avanti, at the same time also announcing that the Cafaro Company of Youngstown, Ohio had purchased an equity position in the company.
Avanti 1987-1991
All assets of the company were purchased by John J. Cafaro in 1987. With financial assistance from the state of Ohio, all Avanti production moved from South Bend to a plant in Youngstown, Ohio. The II was dropped from the name in 1987 and all subsequent cars were simply named Avanti as the new owner felt that sufficient time had passed since Studebaker folded to give the car its original name back. Still built on the G-body Monte Carlo chassis, the company made 2-door coupes and a convertible model. 1988 Avantis were called “Silver Year” models as it was the 25th anniversary of the car’s introduction.
In 1989 Cafaro lost faith in the selling power of the original coupe and introduced a four-door version based on the Chevrolet Caprice platform as Chevrolet had discontinued the Monte Carlo in 1987. Only 90 four-door Avantis were built and 405 total in the four years that the Youngstown, Ohio plant was in operation.
Avanti 1999-2006
Michael Eugene Kelly re-purchased the New Avanti Motor Company in 1999 and moved operations from Youngstown, Ohio to Villa Rica, Georgia, again producing coupe and convertible Avantis with revised front and rear fascias. In 2004 the company switched from Chevrolet chassis’ and running gear to a Ford Mustang chassis, engine and transmission. A 2005 internet report stated that “Avanti Motors [had] recently announced a new relationship with Ford Motor Company and was planning a big comeback.
In early 2006 Kelly moved production from Georgia to Cancun, Mexico, but the company foundered after Kelly was arrested on fraud charges in December 2006 over a large Ponzi scheme he was running. The last Avanti rolled off the line in Cancun in March 2006 with a Rousch V6 engine, the only one so equipped. All of the other Mustang-based Avantis used Ford V8s. The factory and showroom were emptied in 2011 and have been sold. There were many extremely rare Studebaker and Avanti concept cars and race cars owned by the company that were on the second floor of the plant, and they have either been sold or moved elsewhere. ✪
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