Studebaker Avanti - And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them?

In October 1963, Motor Trend ran an article on some of the new model year cars. Among them, the Studebaker Avanti.

In the sixties, the car industry was still woozy from the "cars should look like airplanes" trend of the fifties. Fins were shrinking and pretend rocket engines were slowly turning back into normal tail light lenses once again. If you ask me, the fifties were a  time of juvenile car design. Everybody was thrilled with the "space age" and anything that could be made to look like a rocket, should look like a rocket. Nobody seemed to bother to ask "why?". Why should a family car, that rarely if ever exceeds fifty miles per hour, have little wings on the back? Answer: Because grownups are just large children.

To be fair, this motivation hasn't really gone away. Four out of five 1990-something Honda Civics have a giant picnic table wing pop-riveted to the trunk because it "looks cool". never mind the fact that the car is front wheel drive and a rear wing is intended to provide downforce for the rear wheels which tend to break loose under hard cornering if and only if the car is rear wheel drive.

So, there we were, in 1963, with the entire American auto industry just staggering out of bed, wondering what it drank in the fifties, and tripping over an empty bottle of "Tail Fin Tequila". Then, Studebaker bursts in the front door, morning sunlight beaming in. Studebaker is bright and cheery, wondering if Buick, Chevy and Ford want to go jogging. This was the Studebaker Avanti. The Big Three invited Studebaker to go fuck itself.

The Avanti has always been a very modern car, especially considering the age of the design. There's not much to explain. You look at it and you think it's a 1986 something or other. Then somebody points out that it's a '63 Studebaker and you go "Whaaaaaaa??????". That's what I did.

When you say "Studebaker" to most people, they think of the '51 Studebaker Commander that Fozzie and Kermit drove in The Muppet Movie. This makes it even weirder that in 1962, Studebaker came up with the Avanti, a design that would look more at home twenty or thirty years in the future. I don't mean that in the "That car look like it's from the future." way. I mean that from the perspective of someone several decades in the future who thinks the design would be more at home here and now than in 1963 America.

By comparison, here's a picture of a 1964 Mustang - one of the Avanti's competitors and a car that enjoys a much bigger following than the Avanti. It looks pretty clunky by comparison, if you ask me.

The Studebaker factory closed in December 1963, two months after this issue of Motor Trend hit the shelves. There can be lots of reasons a business calls it quits, but one way of interpreting the closure is that people weren't ready for the Avanti. The rest of the industry still had to go 28 years before saying "Oooooh, I get it now!" and making a car that looked even a little bit like the Avanti.

After the death of Studebaker, the Avanti was still produced in small numbers through 1987, the tooling having been purchased by one entrepreneur after another, being built in small quantities for collectors and enthusiasts. That tells you something.

I'm trying to think of a current car that won't be appreciated fully for another twenty or so years. Well there's plenty of unforgivably ugly cars out there. The Pontiac Aztek, Toyota Venza, and any given SUV spring to mind. Does that mean we'll come around in a few decades to give them their due? I doubt that. What's super modern and misunderstood? Errr. If I knew that I'd be rich.