Packard Motor Car Company

Packard

"Ask the man who owns one."
Former type	Automobile company
Industry	Manufacturing
Fate	folded
Founded	1899
Founder	James Ward Packard, William Doud Packard, George L. Weiss
Defunct	1958
Headquarters	Detroit, Michigan, United States
Key people	Henry B. Joy
Products	Automobile

Coordinates: 42°22′47″N 83°01′44″W / 42.379617°N 83.028928°W / 42.379617; -83.028928

Packard was an American luxury automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, United States, and later by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899, and the last in 1958, with one of the last concept cars built in 1956, the Packard Predictor.

Packard was founded by James Ward Packard, his brother William, and their partner, George Lewis Weiss, in the city of Warren, Ohio, where 400 Packard automobiles were built at their factory on Dana Street Northeast, from 1899 to 1903. A mechanical engineer, James Packard believed they could build a better horseless carriage than the Winton cars owned by Weiss, an important Winton stockholder, after Packard complained to Alexander Winton and offered suggestions for improvement, which were ignored; Packard's first car was built in Warren, Ohio, on November 6, 1899.

Henry Bourne Joy, a member of one of Detroit's oldest and wealthiest families, bought a Packard. Impressed by its reliability, he visited the Packards and soon enlisted a group of investors—including Truman Handy Newberry and Russell A. Alger Jr. On October 2, 1902, this group refinanced and renamed the New York and Ohio Automobile Company as the Packard Motor Car Company, with James Packard as president. Alger later served as vice president. Packard moved operations to Detroit soon after, and Joy became general manager (and later chairman of the board). An original Packard, reputedly the first manufactured, was donated by a grateful James Packard to his alma mater, Lehigh University, and is preserved there in the Packard Laboratory. Another is on display at the Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio.