Franco-American industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s work is infallible, and his four-wheeled designs at Studebaker remain among the most unconventionally beautiful shapes in automotive history. The original Avanti was not only one of the coolest cars of its era, but it also once held the record for fastest production car on the market. The Avanti was famous for delivering serious world-beating performance to the American market years before the Big Three went hog wild in the heady muscle car days of the late 1960s.
With company president Sherwood Egbert taking the reins in 1961 and eager to make an impression, he gave Loewy just six weeks to design the now-iconic high-performance halo car for the brand. Egbert’s philosophical demand for the Avanti was that it “must be tops in speed, braking, handling, safety features, and general innovation—and please don’t spend any money.” A 170-mile-per-hour fiberglass-bodied V8-powered luxury coupe that could take on the Corvette and Thunderbird without flinching, the Avanti was all that and more.
Unfortunately, while the Avanti was an incredible machine, it wasn’t good enough to save a floundering Studebaker from collapse. Studebaker’s went bust just four years later, and a crew of enterprising former Studebaker dealers, brothers Arnold and Nate Altman, and Leo Newman, joined forces to purchase the Avanti name, tooling, and plant space. From there, they spun up the Avanti name into its own brand.
While it was initially a great thing that a revolutionary car like the Avanti was able to live on in the world after its manufacturer’s demise (much like its Excalibur cousin), what happened to it over time is a criminal act of automotive aesthetic. While the Avanti lived on through 2006, what happened in 1989 should be remembered as the tragedy it was.
Where did the sedan come in?
In 1965, as the Studebaker parts began to run out, the Altman/Newman Avanti was modified to accept Chevrolet small-block power, buying in 327 cubic-inch Corvette engines with 300 ponies. Thus the Avanti II was born. Avanti continued with GM engines through the 1980s, with power waning following the fuel crisis-riddled 1970s, until it received a tepid 305 cu in. mill making just 155 horses turned through a three-speed automatic.
When Nate Altman passed away in the late 1970s, his brother began a plan to sell what remained of Avanti Motors Corporation, and in 1982, real estate developer Stephen H. Blake bought Avanti. It took until 1985 for the original run of Studebaker chassis to run out, and Blake had the car re-designed to accommodate new underpinnings. According to a period Popular Mechanics article, Blake hired former Pontiac engineer Herb Adams to develop a more exciting Avanti platform: “With backbone construction, a torque tube, and ’85 Corvette aluminum IRS rear end, the chassis is expected to be hundreds of pounds lighter than the present framework.” Sadly, this plan was scrapped as it was too expensive, and the Avanti moved to a Monte Carlo chassis instead. By 1987, the company was bankrupt and sold once again.
The company passed through the hands of Michael Kelly before John Cafaro bought the remnants and moved it from South Bend, Indiana, to his Youngstown, Ohio, home. Around the same time, GM ended the G-body Monte Carlo, and Avanti was again left without a supply of underpinnings. The car was re-tooled again for the much longer B-body Caprice. While the chassis was shortened under the Avanti coupe and convertible, Cafaro kept it at full length for a new sedan body style for 1989.
Why does it look so bad?
Have you ever noticed that a limousine never looks quite right? Car designers don’t typically craft vehicle shapes with the intent of cutting them in half, extending the middle several feet, and grafting them back together. The result is an uncanny, almost haphazard aesthetic. While unorthodox in its shape, the Avanti was an interesting looking car in its original Loewy shape. By the 1980s, it had been prodded and pulled, the petite chrome bumpers replaced by gaudy molded fiberglass, the round headlights swapped for then-popular rectangular sealed beams. It had become an amalgam of old and new, with European luxury-inspired touches juxtaposed with hot rodder tchotchke, none of it good. Then came the sedan, a true stylistic abomination.
The 1989-only Avanti Sedan proved immediately undesirable and was ditched for 1990. As it turned out, there was already a very tiny sliver of the car market interested in an Avanti in the first place, and they definitely didn’t want an uglier one. Especially as it was effectively little more than a heavy and anemic Chevrolet Caprice underneath. The extreme hand-built price premium wasn’t worth paying. Thankfully for the world, just 90 examples of the Avanti Sedan were built, as unprofitable as it was unpopular. Cafaro’s attempt at reviving Avanti had failed. The factory sat idle, full of half-finished cars, until 1999.
Kelly re-purchased the company and planned a big revival of the brand with Ford Mustang powertrains, moving the whole mess to Villa Rica, Georgia (and later Cancun, Mexico), but he was arrested in 2006 on fraud charges, and Avanti was disbanded once more. What once was the most advanced American car on the market, it seems, was doomed to an ignominious fate of slow collapse and mis-management.
