Cars
The Nostalgia of Forgotten Gods: Packard, USA, 1899-1959
Roarington explores the rise and fall of Packard, a luxury car brand founded in 1899. Despite early success and innovations, fierce competition and poor investments led to its demise in 1958.
Roarington’s journey to discover defunct car brands stops this week in the USA with the story of the brothers James and William Packard. Producers of incandescent lamps in Ohio, they bought a Winton as their first car in the late 1800s and quickly believed they could make a better product. In 1899, they founded the Ohio Automobile Company and built their first car, the single-cylinder Model A, which became a success with several hundred units sold.
In 1903, the company was renamed Packard Motor Car Company and moved to Detroit, a city that would become the automotive capital, immediately positioning itself at the top of the luxury market with impeccable build quality and the V12 Twin Six, the most powerful engine on an American car at the time, and later with the Super Eight's 8-cylinder engine.
