Studebaker Avanti

The Studebaker Avanti is a personal luxury coupe manufactured and marketed by Studebaker Corporation between June 1962 and December 1963. A halo car for the maker, it was marketed as "America's only four-passenger high-performance personal car."

Described as "one of the more significant milestones of the postwar industry", the Raymond Loewy-designed car offered safety features and high-speed performance. Called "the fastest production car in the world" upon its introduction, a modified Avanti reached over 170 mph (270 km/h) with its supercharged 289-cubic-inch (4,740 cm³) R3 engine at the Bonneville Salt Flats. In all, it broke 29 world speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Following Studebaker's discontinuation of the model, a succession of five ventures manufactured and marketed derivatives of the Avanti model through 2006. These ventures licensed intellectual property and, in some cases procured parts, through arrangements with the successors to the Studebaker assets.

Studebaker's advertising agency provided the name Avanti. In Italian it means "forward" or "onward".

The Avanti was developed at the direction of Studebaker president, Sherwood Egbert, who took over in February 1961. The car's design theme was "allegedly doodled by Egbert on the proverbial back of an envelope during an airplane flight." Egbert's 'doodle' was to answer Ford's Thunderbird and an attempt to improve the automaker's sagging performance.

Designed by Raymond Loewy's team, comprising 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 109-inch convertible chassis and powered by a modified 289 Hawk V8 engine. A Paxton supercharger was offered as an option.

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 in Ashtabula, Ohio — the same company that built the fiberglass panels for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953.