Welcome to this episode of Assess and Caress on Jay Leno's Garage. One of the cars I feature today, this one is mine, came to us from the Audrain Automobile Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. This is an important car because this is the very first year of Packard.
No, not quite. An early Packard.
First generation. And this is the last generation. That's what we're kind of, what we're talking about here today. This is brought to us by Reliable Transportation. They do car transportation all across the country. I mean, they pick it up in Rhode Island, they drive it to California. It goes back the same week. I mean, and the car doesn't have a scratch on it. I mean, they put what, 8,000 miles on it in a truck, and it's fine. Yeah, it's great. So, thank you to the Audrain and to Reliable. How are we doing this, Donald? What do you, how do you want to start?
Well, Jay, as you just alluded to, this is first and last.
And the Packard Motor Car Company, of course, is an amazing, legendary company, known throughout the world for its quality and its reputation. And so, we're going to look at two ends of the spectrum. This is a 1902 Packard Model F.
1956 Packard Caribbean. A lot of people know the story of how Ferruccio Lamborghini started his company with a famous argument with Enzo Ferrari.
Oh, well, you know, 'Ferrari, you should do these things to make your cars more reliable, the clutches are not good.' And Enzo Ferrari said, 'Yeah, thank you very much. Go build your own car, tractor maker.'
And of course, the inspiration for all of that was the first great automotive feud and great...
Against Winton. Exactly. Alexander Winton was one of the great early pioneering American car builders. And James Packard bought a Winton in 1898 and had trouble with it. And so, he lived in Warren, Ohio, and Winton was in Cleveland. So, he got into his repaired Winton and drove to Cleveland and said to Alexander, 'Look, you've got a really nice car, but it needs some things so that it could actually be more reliable.' And apparently Winton was having none of it and said,
'Thank you very much. Who the hell are you? You make arc lamps. Go back to your own town and build your own car if you think you can do it better.'
And that's what he did. And you know, Packard was an interesting guy. He also ordered and had built, well, up until very recently, the world's most expensive watch. It was set up to time astronomical, yeah, astronomical, to Warren, Ohio. It was designed to be in Warren, Ohio. The sun would be here, this would be, I mean, it's a very complicated pocket watch. It still exists to this day. I mean, I'm sure maybe Paul Newman's Rolex or something went for more, but in terms of just being a watch, that's the kind of guy he was. He wanted to have the best of everything. So, it's kind of an interesting story.
And so, it was remarkable that by 1899, the next year, he and his brother had built their first car. And these first cars, these first Packards, were one-cylinder cars. And you think about what a one-cylinder car is like, you know, it's a little putt-putt thing. But everything being scaled in a totally different way back in the dawn of motoring, this is a one-cylinder. It's a 3-liter one-cylinder.
Yeah, which is basically the size of a Jaguar six almost.
Exactly. 12 horsepower. And again, 12 horsepower in 1902 was quite a powerful car.
And it was also not an inexpensive car. Motoring was for very much the very wealthy. This car cost about $2,500 in 1902 when the average annual income was $850 a year.
The average house was $1,200, I think. Something like that.
Absolutely astonishing, yeah. Two houses or a Packard, right, your choice. But they're absolutely remarkable vehicles. And the pace of development was so quick at this point that this was the last of the one-cylinder Packards. In 1903, they went to a four-cylinder car.
And also in part of that little sort of spite game, a Packard employee named Fletch drove a four-cylinder Packard Model K from San Francisco to New York in 61 days.
Beating Alexander Winton's record of driving across the country, which I think was something around 80 days or something like that.
Right, that was quite popular in the early days. That's how you tested the metal of a car. Maybe you go New York to San Francisco. There are no roads.
There were no roads. They, they, they, they, they...
You don't need to keep going that way, you know.
Yeah, but there's some wonderful stories about him driving along and finding, 'Oh, this is a great nicely prepared road.' And it turned out to be the road to some rancher's house or to a mine.
They would ask, you know, 'How do I get to this place?' And he would ask people who'd never been more than 10 miles from their house in their lives. It's like, 'Well, somewhere over there.'
And I remember around four or five, two women did it.
Which in the day, women did not drive. That was considered unladylike. And they had guns in case they had trouble. I mean, it's really a great story. These women by themselves drove it across the country, you know, and across men and all. You know, all that kind of stupid stuff, you know. But yeah, it's a really fascinating story. I wish I could, I don't know why the name Jackson comes up, but I'm trying to remember the name of the women.
Um, but it is remarkable again thinking about what we go through here in Los Angeles, you know, driving from Burbank to Santa Monica, it's like this adventure and you don't know how many hours it's going to take you. Driving across the Sierra Nevada and over the Rockies.
It's absolutely astonishing when you think about what they accomplished with these cars. And it also is a great tribute to the fact that yes, they had to do a lot of work on the cars as they went along. But it's one of the reasons why I and you are so fascinated by veteran cars, because they are cars that are so incredibly capable and still can be used. I say this over and over again. You know, we have cell phones in our pockets that we won't be using in 3 years. And here is a car that's 120-some-odd years old that we can use today exactly the way they did.
Exactly. And here in the US, the Horseless Carriage Club of America has wonderful tours for old cars. People who own these cars get out and use them. As a matter of fact, you can see on that plate there that the Audrain has an annual veteran car tour for cars from 1898 to 1918. And it's an amazing thing.
I read a fascinating statistic the other day. London had reached the point where to get across London in a hansom cab in 1888 is exactly the same amount of time to do it in a car now because of traffic. I mean, it's exactly, it's the same, you know, a half hour, 45 minutes. You know, I always tell the story. I was watching a movie, one of these film noir, Richard Widmark in the '50s. And the reason I watched it is because they show Bob's Big Boy, you know, the car meet in the early '50s. So, the guy's in Long Beach and he says, 'Long Beach, it looks like it's 45 minutes to get to Burbank from here.' Which now is 2 and a half hours at least. And there were no highways. It was like that, but it just didn't have the traffic, you know? I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's pretty good.'
Boy, if only we could do that now. And it's also something to look at a car like this because as I mentioned before, the pace of technology was traveling so quickly that this still obviously looks like a horse-drawn carriage. You know, it's got that style. All you need to do is put a lead on the front. You can attach a horse or a pair of horses to this. Speaking of course of the automobile specific items, because one of the things that, for instance, Winton was a pioneer in was the steering wheel. So, they hadn't decided yet whether a tiller was best, a steering wheel, whether it was an inclined wheel, a vertical wheel. And so, this is very interesting because it's got a semi-inclined steering column.
Sort of looking forward to the moment when you'd have the fully inclined steering column.
Like Ralph Kramden driving a bus.
Exactly. You will see, I'm sure you've driven cars like this before. You get such a wonderful sense of control with a more vertical column than you do sometimes with the vertical column.
The thing is, if you found this in a field and you found a 1992 Ford Taurus in a field, you could get this running in a tenth of the time because you don't have electronic relays. You know, a relay goes bad, it still looks, it's still blue, there's no scratches, it looks brand new, you don't know it's bad. You know, with something like this it's so mechanical and so easy to do. That's why these veteran cars are so fun. The average person or the average mechanic could fix it with hand tools.
Exactly. And you also find things that you think are so modern. This is 1902. One of the great advances that Packard made is the H pattern shift, which this car has. You think, 'Wow, 1902.' And when you think about so much that we have in cars today, with the exception of electronics, basically all the basic control of a car was invented before World War I.
And we've just been refining it slowly and perhaps going backwards in some way.
Well, here's the one that's interesting. This car to this car is the same as driving an '80s car to now. Isn't that funny? I mean, when you think of it like that, these seem like they're hundreds of years apart.
But they're only 40 years apart or so, 45 years. Yeah.
And therein lies the story. So, let's take a closer look at our Packard Caribbean.
Or Caribbean, depending on...
Depending on what part of the ocean you find yourself on. One of the things that I enjoy so much about visiting your garage is the incredible artwork you have up. These wonderful personalized paintings of old ads. And you have an ad for the Packard Caribbean, America's sports car.
Yeah, this is America's. 'What do you got, an MG? I got a Packard Caribbean.' We should have a car club.
Yeah. I mean, it's just so funny that it's a sports car. Yeah, they're very funny. And you know, we've had conversations about what is the definition of a sports car? And if one of the definitions of a sports car is a car that's not designed for sort of everyday practical use, this is a car that is designed for leisure time activities. Yes, of course, you could drive this car every day of the week. But this is still made in a time when driving a convertible was a statement.
You had your station wagon. You had your sedan for practical things. But this is a car for you to take to the country club, to the golf club, to go boating, you know.
Yeah, and when you realize the speed limit at this time was probably 50 miles an hour or under. You know, the superhighways had not come in yet. So, a convertible was a relaxing place to be. The reason they sort of banned convertibles, or GM did after '76, was speeds are going 75, 80 miles an hour. People getting wind-blown, there's no need for a convertible anymore. You go to a T-top or something like that. Yeah. But this is just the ultimate cruising. Yeah.
And thinking about power, that 12 horsepower, 3-liter single-cylinder 1902 car to this 1956, I think it's 376 cubic inch. This is a 120 mph car.
With two four-barrel carburetors.
Carburetors. And you know, so this is not some sort of very slow plodding cruiser at all.
Well, the great thing about this car and the reason I got it, besides being kind of outrageous, it has a technical advantage over any other car in the '50s. One of the problems with cars of the '50s, especially GM cars, they all wanted that floaty-boaty Cadillac ride. But when you hit the brakes, the suspension would dive to the, and you literally pogo down the road. With this, you had these torsion bars. When the car even moved a little bit, they would twist and pull it up straight. Let me show you, like if I sit on this, let me see if it does it now. Okay, if I'm going to be level with this thing. I can't get up on it. Here we go. Okay. It'll take a minute. Let's see if it clicks in.
Hear it? It's bringing up level again. When I step off, it'll go up and then it'll come down. You know, they would put these, when these are in parking garages in New York, people get frightened to death because they go in a parking garage and it's like a great mastodon arriving out of the tar pits, you know. People go, 'What happened? What's, is that car running?'
There it goes, readjusting.
See, it's constantly adjusting. See, the front end came down, rear end went up. And it does that at speed. So, when you hit the brakes, it cuts the motor, torsion bars hold it right there. So, this car does not dive. I mean, it's really fascinating.
And another great example of the fact that 60 years after Packard started his company, they're still doing technological innovation to make a better car. Speaking of which, that's the moment that I actually missed before introducing this 1956 Packard, which is the fact that their great ad slogan, 'Ask the man who owns one.' And so, that's what we're doing today. We're asking the man who owns one.
Yeah. Well, that was the slogan. Yeah.
And it's very funny because apparently, I don't know if this is actually true, but it's sort of generally accepted knowledge that the slogan came about for two reasons. One, because Winton did not listen to Packard. And someone apparently asked for a brochure very early on and they didn't have brochures printed yet. And so, he apparently told one of the secretaries to just say, 'Go find somebody else who owns one and ask that guy what he thinks of the car. Ask the man who owns one and he'll tell you all about the car. You don't need my brochure.' One of the other things about this car which I think is so incredibly neat, and it's slightly unfortunate on your example because the original owner was a very conservative fellow, but I also love the fact that again it reminds me of boating. The seat cushions are reversible.
These are reversible. Now, mine has, you'd have leather on one side, and in the summer you'd have fabric so the leather didn't stick to your heat. See, there they're belted here, but you know, the funny thing is if you hit the brakes it's like a pillow fight. They come flying forward. Does that one come out?
Yeah, this one comes out.
Okay. Yeah. That, I'm sorry. There we go. Yeah. See, oh, so you could have all white if you wanted.
You could actually do custom upholstery patterns on your car. It's just so, and of course these dashboards and all the details in these cars is just absolutely exquisite. And the sad thing is the fact that even here in 1956 Packard is still innovating, but the end is already...
