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The 1947 car was witty and everyone kidded it back ("Hey, Mac, are you coming or going?"). It also sold so well that Studebaker's per-share earnings ($8.12) compared favorably with General Motors' and Chrysler's. Buoyed by this success, Loewy later surprised Vance with another specimen of his wit: a quarter-size model of a sports car which eventually turned out to be the 1953 Studebaker. Vance was fascinated, spent hours inspecting the model and suggesting changes. The big decision was made to go into production of the car for 1953—still three years away. It was little enough time. A new chassis had to be designed, the production line altered to turn it out, and the assembly line rearranged for the whole car. There were more than 2,000 other engineering changes, and dozens of new problems to solve. Sample: the sports car was so low that the drive shaft went through the rear seat too close to the top to allow padding. Necessity produced an invention. The rear seat was divided, with a permanent arm rest in the center. Not for a year after the sports-car decision was made did the prototype come out of the factory.
Mixmaster Needed. In a sense, the new car is as old as the auto industry, which was weaned on sports cars and road races. In the first two decades of the century, such iron-armed drivers as Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet were the heroes of the day. In 1906 a Stanley Steamer achieved an unofficial speed of 197 m.p.h. Young bloods roared along the dusty roads in Mercers, Stutzes, Mercedes and Locomobiles, exhausts thundering like Catling guns, driving horses and timid folk into the fields.
But sports cars were for the few; mass production for millions meant a touring car and later a closed car, in which the whole family could ride for thousands of miles in comfort. Sports-car fans scornfully dubbed such cars "jelly molds." Even non-sportsmen have more recently viewed them with alarm. Complained the Automobile Safety Association's President Arthur Stevens: the U.S. driver is "submerged down behind a chromium-draped engine hood, wide, slush-holding fenders, and a sloping, glass, mud-gathering shelf called a windshield, that at times even a Mixmaster couldn't clean." The American Automobile Association, noting the high costs of repairs, scored automakers for designs that "make it more necessary than ever before to replace large segments of the body as a result of damages from accidents." The rugged, reliable American car was far and away the world's best. But couldn't it be better?
Better Answer? The dissatisfaction was mirrored in the postwar hot-rod craze—in which backyard mechanics sought to improve on Detroit's product—and the importation of thousands of foreign cars, such as terrierlike M.G.s, Jaguars, Porsches and Lancias (see color pages). Sports-car clubs sprang up everywhere, and raced their cars at Bridgehampton and Watkins Glen, N.Y., Elkhart Lake, Wis., Pebble Beach, Calif. and Sebring, Fla.