1934 Studebaker-based Pierce-Arrows Part 2

Four inches added to front and rear doors, the front compliments Studebaker’s rumble seat coupe. Roof and floorpan inserts welded in, rear doors tooled anew, 136 wb car with traditional Pierce interior room.

Same 136 chassis and doors, now with Club Brougham’s decklid, moving the backlight forward 4 inches. The new Club Sedan.

Have to include one more because I had recently read some wonderful posts at the AACE forum about Pierce’s V12 and Pierce cars in general vs. competition. Here’s a car that would have beat Duesenberg off the line, in the twisties and on the open road, and still carried a family. Sits on standard 128 chassis, minimalist design including removal of running boards. Priced just under $3,000 in V12 form and weight comfortably below 5000 lbs, would have been good for 120 MPH once engine broken in. Not a catalogue offer but a car that Buffalo would have gladly obliged to create, as it had always done.

Helping take Pierce from 1941 on through to immediate post-war period would have been Virgil Exner’s (working for Loewy) fine response to Sixty Special and GM’s follow-up, the 1940 C-bodies. Also available in 6-window form perfectly suited for Pierce lwb cars. Typical of Exner, all was not perfect, in this case the odd rear fenders would have needed scrapped in favor of new tooled versions that looked… normal.

Added 5.5 inches to 124.5 wb President axle-to-dash (11 inches to Commader’s 119 wb, shown).

That will do it for now. Hope you enjoy, and perhaps see some justification in my sales projections based on the fine products that a Studebaker-Pierce sharing arrangement would have produced.

All comments welcome.

Paul

Also the 1938-40 Model 828 Club Brougham. Used ’36-38 Pierce front design for this and ’41 series not knowing what the designers had actually planned. A nice classic design.

I can’t imagine Pierce surviving the late 1940s through say, the 1970s without basing its bodies on mass produced offerings. Lincoln tried to make a car of Pierce-Arrow quality in 1956, the Continental Mark II. Being only a coupe and of unique body and frame, it failed to generate the sales and margins needed to cover its investment. Cadillac tried the same thing in 1957 with its close-coupled 4-door hardtop Eldorado Brougham, with same result. Only when sharing body stampings with lesser models and brands did these two marques make money, and in the case of Lincoln and Imperial, even this too often proved elusive due to styling and other deficiencies.

For Pierce, the question of who to team with would have become the constant existential challenge, or rather, opportunity if looked at positively. I think the company would have needed to arrive at the post-war party with two things: a strong name that any lesser manufacturer would have welcomed association with, and – Stuart’s astute comment notwithstanding – an automatic transmission, which had Pierce survived would have been the follow-on to the semi-automatic transmission that it would gone on to develop in the late Thirties rather than selling its patent. How demoralizing it must have been for Henry Ford II to have asked GM for its transmission! Steve Kelly has suggested that all the Independents should have worked with Borg-Warner to produce an automatic, an excellent suggestion. Pierce would have likely been the lead program, needing the unit for its first all new post-war design to be competitive with Cadillac.

What design, you may ask? And when? This would have depended on the partner. Let’s explore a few.

As you may be aware, Studebaker stopped making its large cars after the war, determining that its small pre-war Champion was sufficient to carry the company reconstituted as the industry’s first post-war model with “The New Look.” Let’s assume that Pierce would have continued to make its large pre-war Studbaker-based cars, continuing to buy stampings from, I think, Budd out of Philidelphia. Or was it Briggs that Studebaker used? I’ll need to double check.

In late 2015 I shared with this forum a fictitious story about a little boy and his father who purchased a post-war Pierce V12 sedan based on Hudson’s step-down. Collaboration with that respected company would have been one option for Pierce, advantages being that Hudson was working on a revolutionary new unibody car of high strength and low overall height. Disadvantages would have been list of styling/proportion deficiencies in the basic design sufficient to force Pierce to undertake expensive remediation that included reworking of the Mono-bilt space frame and expensive redesign of assembly operations to modify and build out the frame. Additionally, there were personalities involved, in this case stubborn Edward Barit in control of Hudson. While his faults did not become fully apparent until the early 1950s, his embrace of Step-Down’s deficient styling might have been cause for early concern on Pierce’s part, a warning sign.

Here’s a Hudson work-up that uses more Hudson stampings than what I showed in the image accompanying the fictitious story. Pierce’s designers would have grasp the inherent goodness in the Hudson coupe’s proportions, using the those stampings as starting point for its sedan. My work-up adds 8 inches to the coupe’s roof and 4 inches to the front axle-to-dash (aka, hood). Reuse of coupe’s decklid in its entirely would have saved money and, mated to longer roof, would have increased rear overhang by 8 inches, making the car fully competitive with Sixty Special. To decrease Step-Down’s claustrophobic interior and “heavy looking” appearance, its beltline could have been cut down in the greenhouse area and hood made flatter.

Coupe, convertible and long wheelbase 8-pass car, or perhaps “longish” wheelbase 6-pass car for chauffeured executives could have been offered. I have an image but won’t burden you with it.

I also thought about a tie-up with FoMoCo, the all-new 1949 Cosmopolitan offering “good bones” aesthetically, and of body-on-frame construction so no major tear-up to Elmwood Avenue. Lincoln planners might have been interested not only in the automatic transmission but the larger type car that it wanted to produce but couldn’t afford. A Pierce-badged version might, in the eyes of Lincoln marketers, have conferred additional prestige on the Cosmopolitan, better positioning i against Cadillac’s least costly models while Pierce’s version battled Sixty Special. Alas, I wonder if Pierce leadership would have felt they were making a deal with the devil, Dearborn threatening to become ever more possessive and a new fiefdom tantalizing up-and-coming ambitious Ford, Mercury and Lincoln executives.

Have run out a few Lincoln and Mercury-based Pierces into the Fifties and Sixties but for this discussion will present a simple walk from Cosmo to 3-box sedan. The car ended up 5 inches longer than the Caddy, making it a real beast! But such was needed to bring it into good proportion.

Another way to look at these work-ups is to see them as opportunities that Hudson and Lincoln had for their own cars.