Packard in no way created a pickup truck — if they had, maybe they’d be in company these days — but that did not dissuade the enterprising people at Speedwell Garage in Parkton, Maryland. The result is this customized-bodied conversion made from a 1956 Packard Patrician sedan, and it credibly imagines what could possibly have been.
These days, the strategy of a luxurious pickup is firmly proven as a element-laden version of a common pickup, but in the 1950s, the budding notion of a premium hauler was distinct. Automakers assumed the way to do so was to incorporate the trip and ease and comfort of a passenger-vehicle human body with the cargo-hauling functionality offered by a pickup mattress — feel 1957 Ford Ranchero and 1959 Chevrolet El Camino. This El Packard-ero will take that identical tack.
What keeps the venture firmly in time period is that its creators resisted the urge to resto-mod this Packard. Granted, they snuck in a backup camera and a Vintage Air program, but this pickup or else appears to be like just as ’56 Packard pickup might have, had the manufacturing facility turned them out.
The pickup mattress, with a polished wooden ground, slips neatly concerning the sedan’s rear fenders, and the factory taillights and bumper-exiting dual exhaust outlets are preserved. The sedan’s rear doors also are retained, and they nevertheless open up, delivering obtain to storage beneath the cargo bed. The two-tone copper-and-product shade plan is completely fittingly Fifties.
Beneath the hood, is a Packard 374-cubic-inch V8 paired with the company’s two-pace, pushbutton-push Twin-Ultramatic transmission. Even the wheels seem to not deviate from stock, shade-matched steelies with full-face chrome wheel addresses wrapped with broad-whitewall tires.
This Packard pickup has been detailed at Motor City Typical Cars at an inquiring selling price of $68,500 but is now scheduled to cross the block at Mecum’s Kissimmee, Florida, auction this coming weekend. The 1956 design 12 months marked the past of the “real” Packards, as the ’57 and ’58 designs have been grotesquely restyled Studebakers, right after which the brand was euthanized. It was an unfortunate end to the brand’s tale, to which this Packard pickup provides an intriguing, albeit fictional, chapter.