Studebaker Avanti

Studebaker Avanti
1963 Studebaker Avanti
Overview
Manufacturer	Studebaker Corporation
Also called	Avanti
Production	1962: 1,200; 1963: fewer than 4,600
Assembly	South Bend, Indiana
Designer	Raymond Loewy and Associates
Body and chassis
Class	Personal luxury car
Body style	2-door coupe
Layout	FR layout
Related	Studebaker Lark
Powertrain
Engine	289 cu in (4.7 L) 240 hp (179 kW) V8 (1963)
Transmission	3-speed manual 4-speed manual 3-speed automatic
Dimensions
Wheelbase	109 in (2,769 mm)
Length	192.4 in (4,887 mm)
Width	70.3 in (1,786 mm)
Height	53.8 in (1,367 mm)
Curb weight	3,095 lb (1,404 kg)
Chronology
Predecessor	Studebaker Hawk

The Studebaker Avanti is a personal luxury coupe manufactured and marketed by Studebaker Corporation between June 1962 and December 1963. The automaker marketed the Avanti as "America's Only 4 Passenger High-Performance Personal Car."

Described as "one of the more significant milestones of the postwar industry", the car offered combined safety and high-speed performance. The Avanti broke 29 records at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Subsequent to Studebaker's discontinuation of the model, a series of five owner arrangements continued manufacture and marketing of the Avanti model.

The Avanti was developed at the direction of Studebaker president, Sherwood Egbert. "The car's design theme is the result of sketches Egbert "doodled" on a jet-plane flight west from Chicago 37 days after becoming president of Studebaker in February 1961." Designed by Raymond Loewy's team of Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews, and John Ebstein on a 40-day crash program, the Avanti featured a radical fiberglass body mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark Daytona 109-inch convertible chassis and powered by a modified 289 Hawk engine.

In eight days the stylists finished a "clay scale model with two different sides: one a two-place sports car, the other a four-seat GT coupe." Tom Kellogg, a young California stylist hired for this project by Loewy, "felt it should be a four-seat coupe." "Loewy envisioned a low-slung, long-hood/short-deck semi-fastback coupe with a grilleless nose and a wasp-waisted curvature to the rear fenders, suggesting a supersonic aircraft."

The Avanti's complex body shape "would have been both challenging and prohibitively expensive to build in steel" with Studebaker electing to mold the exterior panels in glass-reinforced plastic (fiberglass), outsourcing the work to Molded Fiberglass Body (MPG) in Ashtabula, Ohio — the same company that built the fiberglass panels for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953.

The Avanti featured front disc-brakes that were British Dunlop designed units, made under license by Bendix, "the first American production model to offer them." It was one of the first bottom breather designs where air enters from under the front of the vehicle rather than via a conventional grille, a design feature much more common after the 1980s. A Paxton supercharger was offered as an option.