Studebaker President Coupe 1955 images

Studebaker restyled its 1955 President to compete with Cadillac and Lincoln, but the real story is hiding in the engine bay. A quiet running change partway through the model year gave later cars more horsepower than earlier ones, with no visible way to tell them apart. Here is what changed, and why only 24,665 were ever built.

The premier vehicle of the Studebaker line up for 1955 is the President. The coupe featured here is powered by a 259 CID V8 and the engine Â is coupled to a three speed transmission with overdrive.

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Studebaker was running out of time in 1955, squeezed by the Big Three and desperate to look like it belonged in the same conversation as Cadillac and Lincoln. Its answer was a heavily restyled lineup topped by the President, wrapped in a larger front bumper and a grille so massive it looked borrowed from a much bigger car. Underneath that new face sat an engine with a quiet mid-year secret: a running change partway through the model year that gave later cars noticeably more power than the ones built just months earlier. Most buyers never knew the difference existed. What actually changed under the hood, and when?

A Grille Built to Compete With Cadillac

For 1955, Studebaker leaned hard into the personal luxury car trend sweeping the industry, restyling the President with a larger front bumper and a substantial chrome grille meant to signal status at a glance. The lineup spread across five body styles, including a Deluxe Sedan, State Series Coupe, State Series Hardtop, State Series Sedan, and the State Series Speedster Hardtop, all riding on a 120.5-inch wheelbase for the coupe and hardtop convertible variants.

The Horsepower Bump Hardly Anyone Noticed

The President’s 259.2-cubic-inch V8 ran a 7.50:1 compression ratio through four-barrel carburetion and dual exhaust outlets, a configuration exclusive to the President within Studebaker’s lineup. Here’s the detail that gets lost in most spec sheets: after January 3, 1955, a running change bumped output to 185 horsepower at 4,500 rpm with 258 lb-ft of torque at 2,800 rpm, meaning a President built in February had more muscle than one built the previous November, without a single visible change to tell them apart.

A Rare Survivor From a Turning Point

Studebaker built only 24,665 examples of the President for 1955, a modest number even by the standards of the era, which makes surviving coupes like this one a genuine rarity today. The car represents a company fighting hard to stay relevant against much larger rivals, right before Studebaker and Packard merged the following year in a last attempt to compete.

The Loewy Coupe Shape Underneath the New Face

Strip away the 1955 model year’s bigger bumper and heavier grille, and the President Coupe’s basic body shell traces directly back to the low, wraparound-windshield design Raymond Loewy’s studio created for Studebaker’s 1953 coupes, widely credited as some of the most advanced-looking American cars of the entire decade. By 1955, that shape was already two years old and increasingly dressed up with added chrome and heavier styling cues meant to keep pace with Detroit, a tension between a genuinely forward-thinking original design and the market pressure to look bigger and busier every year.

Independents Were Running Out of Runway in 1955

Studebaker wasn’t fighting this battle alone — Nash, Hudson, and Packard were all independent automakers wrestling with the same problem of enormous tooling costs spread across a fraction of the sales volume the Big Three commanded, a structural disadvantage that no amount of clever styling could fully offset. Nash and Hudson merged into American Motors that same year, and Studebaker’s own answer arrived with the Packard merger completed in 1954, leaving the President as one of the last new car designs to emerge from an independent Studebaker before its identity became permanently tied to Packard’s fortunes.

Overdrive Made a V8 Feel Like a Cruiser

Pairing the 259-cubic-inch V8 with a three-speed manual and overdrive, as this coupe is equipped, gave period drivers something increasingly rare in the mid-1950s: a genuine V8 that could still deliver relaxed, low-RPM highway cruising once overdrive engaged, rather than forcing a choice between performance and comfort. That combination made the President a genuinely pleasant long-distance car for 1955, a reputation independents like Studebaker leaned on heavily since they couldn’t match the Big Three on raw model-year styling changes alone.

Why Surviving Presidents Are Genuinely Hard to Find

With only 24,665 Presidents built for the entire 1955 model year, and decades of Midwest winters, casual scrapping, and a brand that lost its independent identity within two years taking their toll, surviving examples in coupe form are considerably scarcer today than production numbers from bigger independents might suggest. Restoration parts specific to Studebaker’s 1955 model year are correspondingly harder to source than for comparable Big Three cars, making a documented, well-preserved example like this one a meaningfully bigger restoration commitment than its modest original price would suggest.

What Collectors Actually Pay for a Car Like This

The collector market has grown more appreciative of independent-brand cars from this era in recent years, driven partly by nostalgia for designs that didn’t simply copy Detroit’s playbook, and partly by genuine scarcity as fewer clean originals survive each year. A well-documented 1955 President Coupe with its correct V8 and overdrive combination tends to draw serious interest specifically from Studebaker specialists and independent-marque collectors, a narrower but often more dedicated buyer pool than mainstream muscle car auctions attract.

The Packard Merger That Changed Everything Within a Year

Studebaker and Packard’s 1954 merger, finalized just as the 1955 model year President was hitting showrooms, was meant to create combined purchasing power and shared engineering resources strong enough to compete with the Big Three, but the reality proved far messier than either company’s executives hoped. Within a few years, Packard’s own nameplate would effectively become a badge-engineered Studebaker, making the 1955 President one of the last Studebakers built before that merger fundamentally reshaped what both brands actually were.

A Grille That Told Buyers Everything Before They Sat Down

Studebaker’s stylists understood that in 1955, a car’s grille did more selling than almost anything under the hood, which is why the President’s oversized chrome front end was designed to be recognizable from across a dealer’s lot rather than subtle. That emphasis on first impressions reflected a hard truth independents like Studebaker faced: with a fraction of the advertising budget of the Big Three, a car had to sell itself visually in the showroom, since there was no national television campaign to build brand recognition ahead of time.

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