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The 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 wrapped a Paxton-supercharged 289 making 289 horsepower in a Raymond Loewy fiberglass body, and Studebaker sold it as the world’s fastest production car. Hemmings’ Mike Musto asks whether the last new car out of South Bend was America’s first muscle car — or its most beautiful misfire.
Nightmare Logistics spent Mecum Harrisburg 2026 chasing the cheapest hammer prices they could find, and came back with ten cars that sold for between $2,000 and $4,500 — before the buyer’s premium even gets added. A scarce Studebaker outshines several mainstream muscle cars in the comments, and one viewer’s story about a 2005 Thunderbird bought as an “investment” back in the day gets an unexpectedly blunt update twenty years later. Which bargain would you have raised your paddle for?
In the years right after World War II, Packard wasn’t just competing with Cadillac for America’s luxury car buyers — it was actually winning, with the Clipper-era lineup outselling Cadillac and LaSalle combined for a stretch. This 1949 Eight represents that high point: America’s last great straight-eight era, built the same year Packard’s total production topped 116,000 cars. It also marks the beginning of the end, since the brand still lacked the modern overhead-valve V8 that was about to reshape the entire industry.
Scott Cawley’s 1950 Studebaker still wears the polarizing bullet nose that made strangers ask which direction the car was actually driving, but this one skips the trailer-queen treatment most survivors get. An updated suspension and a modern engine swap keep it as a genuine daily driver, seventy years after Studebaker’s gamble on Raymond Loewy’s design became the best-selling year in company history. Read on to see what made the design so divisive in the first place.