| What is this Studebaker thing anyway? |
Many people have no idea what a Studebaker is anymore, if you are one of them the answer is as simple or complicated as you want it to be.
The simple answer is Studebaker is a defunct car company... but to say that is far too simple an answer.
Studebaker was a car company, a builder of trucks, airplane engines, wagons, it was a way of life for many families for generations. To this day Studebaker holds the record for being the longest lasting manufacture of vehicles, 114 years, from 1852 to 1966.
Studebaker was innovative, they had to be to survive, they had the Hill Holder, a great gadget to keep a manual transmission car from rolling back on hills, their own automatic transmission, they were the first American car company to make disk brakes standard on a regular production car and make them available across the board. They had innovative styling, the bullet nose cars from 50 and 51, the beautiful "Lowey" Coupe (actually Bob Bourke) of 1953 that lead to the Hawks, the Avanti and interesting things like a station wagon with a sliding roof.
Alas, management also made a lot of poor decisions, with ultimately led to the company disappearing, although they never did go out of business, they just merger and accusationed themselves out of existence.
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