Daniel sent us this one. He wants to talk about Studebakers. Not just the history of the company — he wants to know why people are still obsessed with these cars. What makes someone devote their garage, their weekends, and a suspicious chunk of their retirement fund to a car brand that hasn't existed since the Johnson administration. And he's asking whether it's just nostalgia, or if there's something about the cars themselves that explains the devotion. I have to admit, I've seen these things at shows and the owners have this look — it's different from the Corvette guys or the Mustang people.
Oh, completely different. And I'm glad Daniel asked this, because Studebaker enthusiasm is this fascinating case study in what actually drives automotive devotion. Most people assume it's about performance specs or market dominance, and Studebaker had neither by the end. But the enthusiast community is massive, it's organized, and it's not shrinking.
Before we dig into the psychology of it, I should mention — DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today, so if I sound unusually articulate, that's why.
Explains why my tangents are actually relevant for once. So let's start with what we're even talking about. Studebaker started as a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana, in eighteen fifty-two. They built wagons, then carriages, then they supplied wagons to the Union Army during the Civil War. They didn't build their first car until nineteen-oh-two — an electric one, by the way, which is a detail that makes modern EV enthusiasts very happy.
An electric car in nineteen-oh-two?
Yeah, designed by Thomas Edison himself. It had a range of about forty miles and topped out at thirteen miles an hour. They only made about twenty of them. But here's the thing — Studebaker was already seventy years old as a transportation company before they got serious about gasoline cars. That's not normal. Ford was founded in nineteen-oh-three and just started building cars. Studebaker had this deep institutional memory of making things that moved, and it shaped their whole approach.
They came at the automobile as carriage builders. That's got to influence the design philosophy.
It did, and it's one of the first things enthusiasts will tell you. Studebakers were built with a kind of craftsmanship mentality that came from the carriage trade. The fit and finish on a nineteen-thirties Studebaker President, for example — the interior woodwork, the way the doors close, the quality of the upholstery — it's a different standard than what you'd get from a company that started out stamping fenders. And enthusiasts notice that. They'll open a door on a nineteen-thirty-one President and just... breathe it in.
You're doing the thing where you get misty-eyed about door hinges.
I contain multitudes, Corn. But here's where it gets interesting from a community perspective. Studebaker was never the biggest. They were usually fighting for third or fourth place behind Ford, Chevy, and sometimes Plymouth. So buying a Studebaker was already a choice — you weren't just grabbing the default option. And that self-selection created a certain kind of owner from the very beginning. Someone who thought about the decision.
The contrarian buyer. The person who walks past the Ford dealership and says, no, I want the thing my neighbors can't identify.
And that personality type — independent, a little stubborn, willing to do more research — that's the same personality type that joins a car club and keeps a vehicle running for sixty years. The enthusiast base was baked into the customer base from the start. It's not an accident that Studebaker owners are intense. The company attracted intense people.
You're saying if you bought a Studebaker in nineteen-fifty, you were already the kind of person who'd still own one in two thousand twenty-six.
The data supports that, at least anecdotally. The Studebaker Drivers Club — that's the main international organization — has about twelve thousand five hundred members across more than thirty countries. They hold an annual international meet that regularly draws over a thousand cars. This is for a brand that sold its last vehicle in nineteen sixty-six. That's sixty years of sustained, organized enthusiasm with no new product, no factory support, no corporate marketing budget. Just the cars and the people who love them.
Twelve thousand five hundred members is substantial. That's not a handful of eccentrics in a barn somewhere.
They publish a monthly magazine, Turning Wheels, which has been running since nineteen seventy-two. Full-color, technical articles, restoration guides, historical deep dives, classifieds. It's a real publication. The club has chapters in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden. There's a Studebaker museum in South Bend that's a proper institution — not some dusty warehouse, but a fifty-five thousand square foot facility with about a hundred and twenty vehicles on display, plus an archive of corporate records, photographs, and engineering drawings.
That's the thing that surprises me — the infrastructure around a dead brand. You'd expect the cars to be scattered among general antique car collectors, but instead there's this entire parallel ecosystem keeping them alive.
It's not just preservation, it's active use. The Studebaker Drivers Club organizes road tours where people drive these cars hundreds of miles. There's a contingent that shows up at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals every year, which is interesting because Studebaker isn't the first name that comes to mind when you say "muscle car." But they're there, and they're competitive.
Wait — Studebaker had muscle cars?
This is the part of the story that makes enthusiasts' eyes light up. In nineteen fifty-seven, Studebaker introduced the Golden Hawk with a McCulloch supercharger on a two hundred eighty-nine cubic inch V8, making two hundred seventy-five horsepower. That was the first supercharged production car in the American market. Before the Ford Thunderbird, before any Chrysler product, before anything from GM. Studebaker got there first. The Golden Hawk could do zero to sixty in about seven seconds, which was genuinely fast for nineteen fifty-seven.
The first supercharged American production car was a Studebaker. That's the kind of fact that makes enthusiasts insufferable at car shows, and I mean that as a compliment.
The Avanti, which came out in nineteen sixty-three, was designed by Raymond Loewy's team in just forty days. Fiberglass body, disc brakes — disc brakes, Corn, in nineteen sixty-three, when most American cars were still running four-wheel drums — and a supercharged R two engine option that made close to three hundred horsepower. The Avanti could hit over a hundred seventy miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Andy Granatelli set multiple speed records with modified Avantis. This wasn't some stodgy company building grandpa sedans. They were innovative.
The enthusiast argument is that Studebaker was technically ahead of its time, underappreciated in the market, and that owning one today is partly about vindicating that history.
That's a big piece of it. There's a corrective impulse. Enthusiasts feel like the public never gave Studebaker its due, and restoring and showing these cars is a way of setting the record straight. You'll hear this phrase a lot at Studebaker meets — "ahead of their time." It's practically the brand motto in retrospect. And there's truth to it. The nineteen forty-seven Studebaker Starlight coupe had a wraparound rear window that wouldn't become common for another decade. The nineteen fifty-three Starliner was designed by Loewy's team and is widely considered one of the most beautiful American cars ever built — the Museum of Modern Art actually featured one. These were design-forward cars from a company that was constantly trying to punch above its weight.
The company went under. So the enthusiasm is partly about what could have been.
Right, and that's where the psychology gets really interesting. With a Ford or a Chevrolet, the story is complete — the company succeeded, the cars are everywhere, there's no mystery. With Studebaker, there's this unfinished narrative. The last few years were desperate and creative — they merged with Packard in nineteen fifty-four, which was supposed to create a fourth major American automaker but instead just combined two struggling companies. Then they brought in the Lark in nineteen fifty-nine, a compact car that actually sold well initially, before the Big Three crushed them with their own compacts and a price war Studebaker couldn't survive. The last Studebaker rolled off the line in Hamilton, Ontario on March sixteenth, nineteen sixty-six — a turquoise Cruiser sedan. And that was it. Sixty years of history, over.
There's a tragedy narrative there, and people love a tragedy. The underdog that almost made it.
Here's what separates Studebaker enthusiasm from just romanticizing failure — the cars are actually good. They're not just historically interesting, they're mechanically interesting and aesthetically distinctive. You can take a well-restored Studebaker to a general car show and it'll draw a crowd, because most people have never seen one up close and they're striking. The nineteen fifty-three Commander Starliner hardtop — that car still looks modern. The proportions, the low beltline, the greenhouse. It's not a period piece the way a nineteen-fifties Buick is a period piece.
I think that's a key point. Some antique cars are charming because they're so obviously of their era. A Model T is a museum exhibit. But a Loewy-designed Studebaker could almost pass for a contemporary design statement if you didn't know cars.
That's exactly what enthusiasts will tell you. Loewy's team — Bob Bourke, John Ebstein, Bob Andrews — they were designing with European proportions in mind. Lower, longer, cleaner. The nineteen fifty-three Starliner was compared to the contemporary Alfa Romeos and Lancias, not to the Chevrolets and Fords. There's a reason it's in museum collections. So when an enthusiast restores one of these, they're not just preserving history — they're preserving a design argument that Studebaker was right and the market was wrong.
Okay, let's talk about the restoration side, because Daniel specifically asked about the practical reality of keeping these things running. Parts availability for a brand that's been dead sixty years — that's got to be a challenge.
This is where the enthusiast community becomes impressive. The Studebaker Drivers Club and a network of specialized suppliers have recreated the supply chain that the factory used to provide. There are companies like Studebaker International and Stephen Allen's Auto that reproduce parts — everything from sheet metal to trim pieces to engine components. The club maintains a parts cross-reference database so you can figure out which modern components are compatible. There are technical advisors for every model and every system — volunteers who are the world expert on, say, Studebaker automatic transmissions or Studebaker electrical systems, and they'll take your phone call.
That's not a hobby, that's a parallel industrial economy.
It really is. And the knowledge preservation is just as important as the parts. The Studebaker National Museum archives contain the original engineering drawings, production records, correspondence. If you're restoring a nineteen fifty-seven Golden Hawk and you need to know exactly how the supercharger plumbing was routed from the factory, there's probably a drawing for that. The community has done an extraordinary job of capturing and preserving institutional knowledge that would otherwise have been lost when the company closed.
What does it cost to get into this? If someone listens to this episode and thinks, I want a Studebaker — what are they looking at?
It varies enormously, which is actually one of the appealing things about the marque. A solid, running Lark from the early sixties can be found for eight to twelve thousand dollars. They're not especially desirable among collectors, but they're good cars — simple mechanicals, comfortable, parts are available. A nicely restored nineteen-fifties Commander or Champion might be twenty to thirty thousand. The halo cars — Golden Hawks, Avantis, the nineteen-fifty-three Starliner — those can push into the fifty to eighty thousand range for show-quality examples. A supercharged Avanti R two in excellent condition, maybe a hundred thousand. Compare that to what you'd pay for a comparable Corvette or Thunderbird from the same era, and Studebakers are actually quite accessible.
There's a value proposition. You're getting design significance and historical interest for less than the equivalent from a more famous brand.
The community is famously welcoming. The Studebaker Drivers Club has a reputation for being less hierarchical than some other marque clubs. You show up with a rough Lark that you're still figuring out, and the guy with the concours-quality Avanti will spend an hour walking you through carburetor adjustments. There's a shared sense that every Studebaker kept on the road is a win for the community, regardless of condition or rarity.
— the scarcity actually makes the community more cohesive, not more competitive. If there were millions of these cars still around, maybe the dynamic would be different.
There's research on this, actually — in collector communities where the objects are rare, cooperation tends to be higher because the shared goal of preservation overrides status competition. When there are only a few thousand examples of a particular model left, every surviving car matters to the community. The guy with the barn-find Champion isn't your rival, he's your ally in keeping the parts suppliers in business.
What's the demographic of this community? Is it aging out, or is there a younger generation coming in?
It's a mix. The core membership of the Studebaker Drivers Club skews older — people who remember these cars from their youth, or whose parents owned one. But there's a growing contingent of younger enthusiasts who are drawn to the design, the underdog story, and frankly the value proposition. When a thirty-year-old car enthusiast looks at the market and sees that a decent vintage car from the Big Three costs forty thousand dollars, a Studebaker starts to look very attractive. And the community has been smart about digital outreach — active forums, social media presence, YouTube channels documenting restorations.
The Avanti in particular seems like a gateway drug for younger collectors. It's got that space-age design, genuine performance credentials, and it doesn't look like anything else on the road.
The Avanti is fascinating because it almost became its own thing. After Studebaker closed, two former dealers bought the rights to the Avanti name and continued producing the car by hand in South Bend until the nineteen eighties. Then the tooling moved around — there were Avanti IIs, then Avantis built in Youngstown, Ohio, then in Cancun, Mexico, of all places. The last Avanti was built in two thousand seven. So there's this weird second life where the car outlived the company that created it by forty years.
A car built in Cancun under a brand name from a defunct Indiana manufacturer. That's the kind of convoluted history that repels normal people and attracts the exact personality type we're talking about.
And that's really the answer to Daniel's question, isn't it? Why do people love keeping up these cars? It's not one thing — it's a combination of genuine design excellence, mechanical innovation that was ahead of its time, an underdog narrative with a tragic ending, a welcoming community that makes ownership practical, and entry costs that are reasonable compared to alternatives. But the core of it, I think, is that Studebakers reward engagement. The more you learn about them, the more interesting they become. They're not just cars, they're stories — and every restoration is a new chapter.
There's also something to be said for distinctiveness in an era of homogenization. If you go to a cars and coffee event in two thousand twenty-six, you'll see rows of Mustangs and Camaros and Porsches — all impressive cars, but they blur together. A Studebaker doesn't blur. It stands out because the visual language is different, the proportions are different, the whole design philosophy is from a parallel timeline where the market made different choices.
The parallel timeline framing is exactly right. Walking through the Studebaker museum, you get this sense of an alternate history of the American automobile. What if Studebaker had been better capitalized? What if the Packard merger had worked? What if the Lark had sustained its early momentum? Every car in that museum represents a moment where a different decision might have changed the trajectory. Enthusiasts are the people who can't stop thinking about those counterfactuals.
There's a political economy angle here too, which I think is underappreciated. Studebaker's decline maps onto the broader deindustrialization of the Midwest. South Bend was a company town — when Studebaker closed its Indiana operations in nineteen sixty-three, it threw something like seven thousand people out of work in a single day. The economic shock was devastating, and South Bend took decades to recover. Restoring a Studebaker isn't just nostalgia for a car, it's a connection to a manufacturing economy that doesn't exist anymore.
That's a really important point. The closure was a major factor in South Bend's economic decline through the sixties and seventies. The old factory complex sat empty for years before being demolished. The museum and the enthusiast community are, in a way, preserving the memory of an industrial heritage that's otherwise been erased. When someone in South Bend restores a Studebaker, they're not just restoring a car — they're maintaining a tangible link to the city's identity.
The cars were built in Hamilton, Ontario too, right? The Canadian operation outlasted the American one.
Yes, the Hamilton plant was the last Studebaker production facility. After South Bend closed in December of nineteen sixty-three, all production moved to Hamilton, and they kept building cars there until March of sixty-six. The Canadian cars have their own following — slightly different specifications, some unique models. There's a whole sub-niche of Studebaker enthusiasm focused specifically on the Hamilton-built cars.
You've got regional loyalty layers on top of everything else. South Bend pride, Canadian pride. It's like a nesting doll of niche enthusiasm.
I haven't even mentioned the truck people. Studebaker built trucks from the nineteen thirties through the early sixties — the Champ, the Transtar, the M series military trucks. The Studebaker US six was a six-by-six truck built during World War Two that was used extensively by the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. The Russians called it the "Studer" and it was so well-regarded that it influenced Soviet truck design for years afterward. There are Studebaker truck enthusiasts who care about nothing else. Entire forums dedicated to Studebaker six-by-six restorations.
The Soviet military truck angle is not something I expected to come up in this conversation.
Lend-Lease sent about a hundred thousand Studebaker trucks to the Soviet Union. They were used on the Eastern Front, they were used to tow artillery, they became the basis for the Katyusha rocket launcher platform. Joseph Stalin himself reportedly praised the Studebaker truck's reliability. This is a South Bend product that played a role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, and most Americans have no idea.
That's another piece of the enthusiast psychology, isn't it? Being part of a community that knows things the general public doesn't. There's a satisfaction in owning a car with a secret history.
A secret history, and in some cases, secret performance. I mentioned the Granatelli Avantis at Bonneville — in nineteen sixty-three, an Avanti with a modified R three engine set a flying mile record of a hundred seventy point eight miles per hour. That same year, a supercharged Studebaker Lark set a record of a hundred thirty-two miles per hour in its class. These were production-based cars, not purpose-built racers, and they were setting records that stood for years.
The Lark — that's the economy car, right? The sensible compact they brought out to compete with the imports?
Yes, the Lark was supposed to be Studebaker's savior. It launched in nineteen fifty-nine, just as the compact car market was taking off. It was six inches shorter and a thousand pounds lighter than the standard American sedan of the time, and it got up to thirty miles per gallon, which was exceptional for nineteen fifty-nine. It sold well initially — over a hundred thirty thousand units in the first year. But then GM, Ford, and Chrysler all launched their own compacts — the Corvair, the Falcon, the Valiant — and they had the dealer networks and the marketing budgets to squeeze Studebaker out.
The Lark was a good car that got crushed by the economics of the industry, not by any failure of engineering or design. That's the Studebaker story in a nutshell.
That's why the enthusiast community doesn't just restore the glamorous models. You'll see meticulously maintained Larks at Studebaker meets, because the community recognizes that the Lark was a legitimate achievement. It was the right car at the right time, and the company just didn't have the resources to capitalize on it.
Let's talk about the restoration culture itself. You mentioned the parts network — how does someone actually go about restoring a Studebaker in practical terms? If I find a nineteen-fifty Commander in a barn, what's my first move?
The first move is always joining the Studebaker Drivers Club and getting connected with the technical advisor for your model. That person will tell you what you're getting into — common rust areas, parts availability for that specific year, known mechanical issues. Then you'll want to assess the car's completeness. Studebakers used a lot of model-specific trim, and some of it is essentially irreplaceable. If the car is missing its grille or its unique taillight lenses, you could spend years hunting for those parts. The club's classifieds and swap meets are essential for that.
Mechanically — are these cars straightforward to work on?
For the most part, yes. Studebaker engines are conventional pushrod V8s or inline sixes — the engineering team in South Bend was competent but conservative. The engines are known for being robust and relatively simple to rebuild. The Studebaker two hundred eighty-nine cubic inch V8, which was used in various forms from the early fifties through the end of production, is particularly well-regarded. It's a thick casting, strong bottom end, responds well to modern upgrades. Parts for the engines are generally available. Where it gets tricky is the bodywork, especially for the Loewy-designed cars with their complex curves. And some of the automatic transmissions — the Borg-Warner units — have specialists who are getting older and harder to find.
There's a clock ticking on some of the knowledge. The people who know how to rebuild a Studebaker automatic transmission are aging, and not enough younger people are learning those skills.
This is a real concern in the community, and it's not unique to Studebaker. The generational knowledge transfer is a challenge across the antique car hobby. But Studebaker enthusiasts are unusually proactive about documentation. The club's technical articles archive is extensive, and there are detailed restoration videos on YouTube. The hope is that even as the old-timers pass on, the knowledge will be preserved in a form the next generation can use.
What about the experience of actually driving one? A nineteen-fifties Studebaker on modern roads — is it a white-knuckle experience or enjoyable?
It depends on the model and the level of restoration, but a well-sorted Studebaker from the fifties or sixties is a perfectly drivable car by modern standards — with caveats. The brakes, unless upgraded, will require more planning than a modern driver is used to. The steering is typically unassisted recirculating ball, which means some effort at parking speeds. But on the open road, these cars are comfortable, stable, and capable of keeping up with traffic. The V8 cars have enough power that you're not a rolling roadblock. And because Studebakers tend to be lighter than their Big Three equivalents — the Lark was a light car by American standards — they feel more nimble than you'd expect.
The attention you'd get driving one — that's part of the appeal, I assume.
Drive a nineteen-fifty-three Starliner to a gas station and you will have a conversation with someone. These cars are rare enough that most people have never seen one in person, and they're distinctive enough that people want to know what they're looking at. There's a social dimension to Studebaker ownership that you don't get with a more common vintage car. You become an ambassador for the brand, whether you planned to or not.
Which probably selects for a certain kind of owner. Someone who enjoys explaining things, who doesn't mind being approached by strangers, who's comfortable being the center of attention in a parking lot. The introverts probably gravitate toward more anonymous classics.
There's probably some truth to that. The Studebaker owner who brings their car to shows is signing up for a day of conversations. "What is that?" "Who made it?" "Are they still in business?" You'll answer those questions a dozen times in an afternoon. And the enthusiasts love it — they've got their elevator pitch ready, they know the key facts, they're ready to convert the curious into the converted.
To circle back to Daniel's question — why do people love keeping up these cars — it sounds like the answer has layers. There's the design quality, which is exceptional and holds up decades later. There's the engineering innovation that was ahead of the market. There's the underdog narrative that appeals to a certain psychology. There's the community, which makes ownership practical and socially rewarding. There's the value proposition relative to more famous marques. And there's the distinctiveness — the feeling of owning something that not everyone has, something that represents a road not taken in American industrial history.
That's a good summary. I'd add one more layer, which is the stewardship ethic. A lot of Studebaker owners talk about themselves as custodians rather than just owners. The cars are finite — there's a known number of surviving examples for most models, and no more will ever be made. Every restoration preserves something irreplaceable. That sense of responsibility gives the hobby a depth that goes beyond just enjoying old cars.
There's a phrase I've heard in other preservation communities — "we're just looking after it for the next generation." It's a recognition that the object will outlast the owner, and the owner's job is to pass it on in better condition than they found it.
And the Studebaker community has institutionalized that ethic through the museum, through the technical archives, through the parts reproduction efforts. They're not just preserving individual cars, they're preserving the capacity to preserve them. It's a multi-generational project.
Do you think there's a Studebaker in your future, Herman?
I've looked at Avantis more than once. The nineteen sixty-three model, supercharged, in gold. It's an extraordinary shape — Loewy's team did something radical with that car. No grille, just a smooth nose with an air intake underneath. The asymmetrical dashboard. The aircraft-inspired controls. It's a design that still looks like the future, sixty years later. That said, I'm not sure I have the garage space, or the patience for another restoration project.
You say that now, but I've seen how you get at car shows. One ride in a Golden Hawk and you'll be on the classifieds before we get home.
I make no promises. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The earliest known reference to ice cave exploration comes from a first-century Roman geographer describing frozen subterranean chambers in the volcanic highlands of what is now Equatorial Guinea — though the term "ice cave" itself derives from the Latin "glacies caverna," which originally referred not to frozen water but to the glassy, mirror-like quality of certain volcanic rock formations that early explorers mistook for permanent ice.
Sounds like a DJ name.
I'm not touching that one.
Here's the open question I'd leave listeners with. Studebaker has been gone for sixty years, and the enthusiasm isn't fading — it's evolving. As the generation that remembers these cars new passes on, the community is being sustained by people who have no personal memory of the brand. They're drawn by the design, the story, the community. What other defunct brands — automotive or otherwise — have that same potential for a posthumous enthusiast culture? And what does it say about how we form attachments to objects that outlive the institutions that created them?
That's a interesting question. There are brands that die and are forgotten, and there are brands that die and become more interesting. Studebaker is in that second category. What determines which one a brand becomes?
Something to chew on. This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by the inimitable Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps more people find the show.
Until next time.
