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1936 – 1956
The arrangement: Studebaker's design era ran on an outside studio. In 1936 the company first retained Raymond Loewy and Associates, with Helen Dryden, as design consultants — Loewy on exteriors, Dryden on interiors — and the first Loewy-credited Studebakers appeared for 1938. Loewy was the most famous industrial designer in America and no car stylist in the modern sense: his cars were designed by the staff of his Studebaker studio and presented under his name, a division of credit that runs through everything that follows and is stated in each case as the record gives it.
The Champion: The first fruit of the recovery was the 1939 Champion, a new low-priced car engineered under chief engineer Delmar "Barney" Roos, with final styling by Virgil Exner working in Loewy's studio. It doubled the company's previous-year sales on its introduction and put Studebaker into the low-price field it had missed since the Rockne. The Champion line ran to 1958 and was the company's volume backbone for two decades.
1947 — "First by Far with a Postwar Car": Because its designer was an outside firm not bound by the wartime restrictions on in-house styling work, Studebaker reached the postwar market with the first all-new postwar car, for 1947, two years ahead of the Big Three — launched under the slogan "First by far with a post-war car." The design's signature was the Starlight coupe, with a wraparound rear window of curved glass sections sweeping nearly to the doors and a flush rear deck in place of the tapered trunk of the time — the car of which the standing joke asked whether it was coming or going. The credit was fought over at the time and is tangled in the record: the cars were publicly credited to Loewy; the design work was led by Virgil Exner, head of Loewy's Studebaker studio, whose own version of the car Studebaker's board chose over the studio's; Loewy fired Exner over the affair — the accounts differ on whether Exner then finished the cars for Studebaker directly — and Studebaker pacified Loewy with full public credit. The design patents carry Exner's name. What is not disputed is the result: more than 250,000 Studebakers were sold in 1947, and the shell ran, through the "bullet-nose" facelift of 1950–51, into 1952. The bullet nose itself is a studio work of the same house; by then Robert Bourke had succeeded Exner as leader of Loewy's Studebaker studio.
1953 — the Loewy coupes: For 1953 the studio produced the cars by which Studebaker design is still judged: the low Starliner hardtop and Starlight coupes, long-hooded and European in proportion when Detroit was building upright chrome. Publicly credited to Loewy, they were — in the Loewy literature's own correction — actually the work of Robert Bourke, who had led the studio's work on them; Hemmings' history of Loewy's legacy states it as "generally credited to Loewy, but largely the work of Robert Bourke." The coupes sold below the company's hopes — the record notes management's misjudgment in concentrating resources on sedans and the Conestoga wagon — but the design has ranked since among the best of its decade in the collector press's repeated assessments. The studio's final Studebaker commission of the period was the transformation of the coupes into the Hawk series for 1956.
Sources:
- Raymond Loewy, standard encyclopedia biography — the 1936 retention of Loewy and Associates and Helen Dryden, the first credited models, the Starlight's 180-degree rear window, and the 1953 line "publicly credited to Loewy, actually the work of Robert Bourke."
- Hemmings, "Raymond Loewy Automotive Design Legacy" — the 1936 consulting start, Exner's leadership of the team, the two-year postwar lead, the bullet-nose facelift, the 1953 models as largely Bourke's work, and the 1956 Hawk transformation.
- Old Motors, "Are the Stars Out Tonight: Studebaker Starlight" — the 1938 first Loewy models, Exner's leadership and firing, Bourke's succession to the head of Loewy's Studebaker studio and his leadership of the 1953 work, the design patents in Exner's name, and the 250,000 sales of 1947.
- Standard encyclopedia history of Studebaker — the Champion's engineering under Roos, its Exner–Loewy styling, and its doubling of sales in 1939; the Starlight's design features and the coming-or-going joke.