Studebaker Avanti Luxury Muscle Car 1962 and 1963

A Studebaker executive sketched a car on an airplane, and forty days later engineers had a working prototype of America’s first personal luxury muscle car. The Avanti’s story is stranger than most, involving disc brakes before anyone else offered them and a Bonneville-record-setting supercharged engine. Read on to see how a dying company built something this ambitious.

Most classic American cars trace their origin story back to a committee, a formal market study, or a rival’s success that needed answering. The Studebaker Avanti traces its origin to one executive doodling on an airplane, and the fact that the resulting car briefly outran companies with far deeper pockets is one of the more improbable stories in American automotive history. Keep reading, because the path from that sketch to a Bonneville speed record involved more setbacks than most companies could have survived.

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Forty Days From Doodle to Prototype

The idea for the Avanti came from Sherwood Egbert, Studebaker’s new president, during an airplane ride in 1961. Shortly after landing, Egbert began working directly with designers and engineers, and within just 40 days of that flight, the team had built a running prototype of a radical, newly styled automobile wrapped in a fiberglass body — an almost unheard-of development pace for a full production vehicle, let alone one built by a company already struggling financially.

Disc Brakes Before They Were Standard Anywhere Else

The Avanti’s body mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark Daytona convertible frame, powered by a modified 289-cubic-inch Lark V8 producing 240 horsepower. Under the hood, the car featured front disc brakes engineered by British firm Dunlop and manufactured by Bendix — making the Avanti the first American production car to offer disc brakes as standard equipment, years before the feature became commonplace across the industry.

A Production Bottleneck Nobody Planned For

Egbert initially planned to build 20,000 fiberglass bodies using the same manufacturer that had produced fiberglass panels for the 1953 Corvette, but that supplier could only turn out 1,200 bodies within the necessary timeframe. Rather than delay the launch, Studebaker announced through newspapers that it would also produce the molded bodies itself to help meet production goals — one of several production headaches, alongside material shortages and cancelled orders, that plagued the car almost from the start.

An Indy 500 Winner Gets the First One

Studebaker introduced the Avanti to the public on April 26, 1962, at the New York International Auto Show. During the show’s shareholders meeting that same week, Rodger Ward, winner of that year’s Indianapolis 500, received an Avanti as part of his prize package, making him the first private owner of the model — a fitting connection, given that a Studebaker Lark had served as the Indianapolis Speedway’s honorary pace car that same year.

The Beginning of the End for Studebaker

Despite a reasonably strong 1962, Studebaker’s turnaround proved too little, too late, and the company’s last American factory closed its doors on December 20, 1963. Contrary to rumors of thousands of unsold Avantis gathering dust, the plant reportedly had only five units left in its own inventory when production ended, though dealers nationwide were still sitting on roughly 2,500 unsold cars out of the model’s entire 1962-63 run of about 4,600 Avantis built — a stark contrast to Chevrolet’s Corvette, which moved 21,513 units in 1963 alone.

The Avanti Refuses to Die

The Avanti name refused to disappear along with its parent company. Studebaker briefly reopened its plant after allying with Packard under new ownership, resuming limited production in 1965, though a planned return to dealer showrooms for 1966 never materialized. Two former Studebaker dealers eventually purchased the Avanti name along with most of its manufacturing equipment, becoming the first in a long line of successors that kept building Avanti-badged cars and custom variants all the way until 2006 — over four decades after the original Studebaker factory went dark.

The Avanti II Continuation That Followed

That successor company built its continuation cars under the “Avanti II” name, distinguishing them from the original 1962-63 Studebaker-built model even though the styling remained recognizably the same. Cars badged this way, some of which still survive at shows and in private collections today, sit in an interesting gray area for collectors: mechanically updated and often fitted with contemporary drivetrains of whatever decade they were built in, yet still carrying the silhouette that Sherwood Egbert sketched on that 1961 flight.

What Made the Fiberglass Body Both an Asset and a Liability

The Avanti’s fiberglass body was itself a genuine gamble for a company Studebaker’s size. Fiberglass let designers achieve curves that stamped steel of the era simply couldn’t replicate cheaply, and it gave the Avanti a distinctive, low-slung profile unlike anything else on the road in 1962. But that same material created real production headaches, since panel fit and paint quality proved far harder to control at volume than with conventional steel bodies — a tradeoff that contributed directly to the supply bottlenecks and delayed deliveries that dogged the car from its earliest months on sale.

Bonneville Records on a Stock Engine

Underneath its styling, the original Avanti backed up its looks with genuine performance credentials. A stock example equipped with the 289-cubic-inch engine and the optional Paxton supercharger set 29 records on the Bonneville Salt Flats, an achievement that has led automotive historians to describe the car as one of the most significant milestones of the postwar American auto industry — a rare combination, as period reviewers put it, of engineered safety and genuinely blazing speed.

Why the Avanti Still Confuses Collectors Today

Part of what keeps the Avanti confusing for newer collectors is exactly this layered history: an original Studebaker-built car from 1962-63, a Packard-alliance revival in 1965, and then decades of Avanti II continuation cars built by entirely different, unrelated ownership groups. Sorting out which era a given car actually belongs to — and which drivetrain, chassis, and equipment it’s genuinely running — is often the first real research project for anyone shopping this model, and it’s a reminder that even a single, distinctive-looking nameplate can hide a genuinely complicated corporate history underneath. Buyers who take the time to trace a specific car’s build sheet and ownership chain back to its correct era are usually rewarded with a far clearer, more accurate picture of what they’re actually looking at than a quick glance at the badge on the trunk lid alone would ever provide them.

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