The Avanti (3)

The Studebaker era was over. But, the Avanti—whose very name signified moving forward—would continue to do just that. Its revival came at the unlikely hands of South Bend Studebaker dealer, Nate Altman.

Altman was so entranced with the car that he simply refused to admit that it had to die. In one of the great stories in automobile history, he brought the Avanti back to life through sheer force of his own determination.

Altman's initial plan was to knock on doors in Detroit until he found an established manufacturer capable of seeing the wisdom in taking over production of the Avanti where Studebaker had left off. None did and, eventually, Altman decided that he and his partner, Leo Newman, would produce the Avanti themselves.

At first glance the idea seemed absurd. They had no factory, no workers, no dealers, and no working capital. But, Altman was no babe in the woods. He knew that an independent company built around the Avanti would have real advantages not usually available to a newcomer.

First, the product already existed and Studebaker might be willing to surrender its rights and equipment for pennies on the dollar. Second, because the Avanti was constructed of fiberglass, it was ideal for

low-volume manufacture. Third, a dealer network existed. Studebaker was still in the car business, and many Studebaker dealers could be expected to want to continue to offer Avantis. Finally, the Avanti had attracted an enormous amount of interest with the public, and was already becoming something of a cult car. If there was ever a situation in which an "outsider" had a chance, surely this was it.

In February, 1964, Altman and Newman bought six buildings in the old Studebaker complex, with a total of 500,000 square feet of floor space. One of the buildings had been used for final finishing of the original Avantis. Next, Altman asked Molded Fiberglass, of Ashtabula, Ohio, which had supplied the original Avanti bodies, if it would be willing to do the same for an Avanti revival. Robert Morrison, the company president, replied that if Altman and Newman were game, he was, too. The first Avanti II was built on July 22, 1965, and formally introduced to the public in South Bend on August 2nd.

From the first it had been obvious that alterations in the original Avanti would be required. The major problem was the engine, since the supply of Studebaker powerplants could no longer be assured. Altman's substitution was the 327 cubic inch engine used in the Corvette. The Chevy engine was considerably lighter than the Studebaker V8 it supplanted, but, because it was slightly taller in production form, it was necessary to raise the front fender line of the Avanti II about two inches, and to add a filler piece to the front wheel cut-outs. This gave the Avanti II a distinctly different appearance from the Studebaker version.

Unlike Studebaker, Avanti Motor Corporation was not seeking a performance image. The Avanti II was, from the first, aimed at the luxury car buyer who wanted something different, i.e., sort of a "gentleman's" grand touring machine. The Avanti II was available in literally any combination of fabrics the customer cared to bring in. For those customers who did not wish to supply their own, the factory had some 400 selections on hand (see 1966 brochure above). The range of exterior finishes was equally expansive; an Avanti II could be painted in any color obtainable from the paint manufacturers. All this was possible because of the cars would be hand-built.

Altman liked to note that there were two ways to make money in the car business: to be the biggest, or to be the smallest. Knowing he could never be one of the big boys, he intentionally set about creating the smallest car company in America. In doing so, he was determined to run Avanti was the old-fashioned way, with methods and equipment that, to be sure, looked back to the Nineteenth Century more than they did forward to the Twenty-First.

And, it should be noted, the Altman operation did indeed prove to be consistently profitable. According to information distributed by the company in 1983, Avanti Motor Corporation had recorded a profit every year of its existence up to that time.

Almost as soon as the first Avanti II rolled off the jerry-rigged "assembly line" in South Bend, however, increasingly onerous government standards for safety, emissions, and fuel economy, began to plague the company . Altman managed, in April of 1968, to have the company listed officially as a "low-volume" producer, and, therefore, exempt from the more threatening Federal rules and regulations, but it was a problem that had no permanent cure and came back to haunt Altman and his successors again and again. Fortunately, the early Avanti IIs, owing to their Corvette engines, were successfully certified as Corvette derivatives—a much simpler process than certification from scratch.

In time, Altman discovered that most Avanti II customers preferred to buy their cars directly from the factory, and that most leads came as the result of word-of-mouth advertising. So, by the mid-1970s,

Avanti Motor Corporation had evolved into perhaps the only significant auto maker in the world with virtually no dealers. In most years, it still sold all the cars it could comfortably produce.

The first sign that Avanti Motor Company might face an uncertain future came in April, 1976, when Altman fell ill with pneumonia and died. Altman's brother, Arnold, assumed the reigns. Newman was getting older, too, and died on March 20, 1980.

The company seemed to drift. By 1980, tired and under pressure from the Newman and Altman families to sell their holdings, Arnold Altman began listening with increasing interest to the ideas of an Avanti enthusiast named Steve Blake. A "character" of sorts, the thirty-eight-year-old Blake was a Washington, DC, real estate developer and self-described "car nut" and wanted to buy the company. The price eventually agreed upon: $4.3 million. Avanti Motor Corporation was officially sold on October, 20, 1982.

Blake hit South Bend like a whirlwind determined to change everything. His plans included modernizing the car, the facility itself, and even the fundamental way of doing business. The first "new" Avanti to result was the 20th Anniversary Edition announced mid-way through the 1983 model year. With its "Euro" look, this model represented the first fundamental change in the original Avanti design. About the same time the "II" was dropped and, once again, the car was simply the Avanti (see 1984 brochure above).

More ambitious still was Blake's racing effort. He spent $20,000 preparing an Avanti for the Daytona 500 in January, 1983, and, against all odds, the car did surprisingly well. Although it failed to win, it was in fourth place for a while, and finished at 27th.

Yet another portentous change was in the way Avantis were painted. A new Ditzler Deltron urethane paint was used on 1984 production. This paint was supposed to give a deeper, "show car" appearance "while providing unequaled durability."

Next, Blake next launched an even more dramatic departure from existing Avanti design: a convertible. The most ambitious, and potentially far reaching, plan Blake launched, however, was for a car that, as fate would have it, was never built: the Avanti GT. Blake reportedly sunk $250,000 in the program before mounting problems ground everything to a halt in the spring of 1985. Only one prototype was known to have been built.

In 1983, Avanti Motor Corporation attained its all-time peak production year, with 289 cars built and some $8 million in sales. Unfortunately, the unprecedented level of production was accompanied by an alarming decrease in quality. The new paint system was a disastrous case in point. The Ditzler Deltron urethane paint would not bond to the Avanti body panels. A year later, Blake himself admitted that the company had been forced to repaint 270 cars, many of them several times over. The time and expense of dealing with virtually an entire year's production gone bad broke the company's back.

On June 28, 1985, the company filed for bankruptcy. Avanti Motor Corporation was put up for sale and the winning bid on the assets—a reported $722,000—was submitted by Michael E. Kelly, thirty-six, a former South Bend resident then living in Dallas, Texas. On April 30th, Kelly assumed control. Renamed the New Avanti Motor Corporation (NAMC), the company displayed its 1987 models to the automotive press corps on September 4, 1986, and sold its first car on September 22nd.

Alas, in many ways Kelly seemed like Steve Blake reincarnate. He had the same general ideas regarding the direction the Avanti should take in order to be competitive in the 1980s, i.e., away from the car's classic design roots and toward a "soft luxury" approach. In addition, Kelly was possessed of similar ambitions to turn the Avanti into a major competitor in the international, luxury GT market.

NAMC almost immediately announced a new model: the Luxury Sport Coupe. The original Avanti coupe, was renamed the Classic Coupe. Inside, the instrument panel and console received its first

complete restyling since 1962. Underneath, all models featured a new frame and new suspension components, thanks to a decision to build the Avanti off of the Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS chassis.

Early in 1987, Kelly announced that NAMC was looking for a new plant site in which to build a proposed four-door Avanti. Then, on April 30, 1987, he announced that the Cafaro Company, in Youngstown, Ohio, had purchased an equity stake in the New Avanti Motor Corporation. Cafaro, it seems, had a site available in one of his industrial developments, the Ross Industrial Park. And, so, the Avanti would be moving to Youngstown. In fact, the last Avanti built in South Bend left the factory on September 18, 1987. In early December, 1987, Avanti dealers were treated to a preview of a "Silver Anniversary" coupe featuring black-out trim, ground effects, and a lowered front end.

Then, in September, Kelly suddenly resigned when Cafaro bought the rest of the company's assets. John J. "J. J." Cafaro, thirty-seven, purchased Kelly's share of NAMC on September, 1, 1988, and promptly renamed the company the Avanti Automotive Corporation (AAC). He announced that the company would build 350 cars in 1989, 500 in 1990, and 1,000 by 1991. The existing models were the coupe and the convertible, but the heart of this expansion strategy was to be a new four-door Luxury Touring Sedan, or "LTS" (see photos above and below).

The first four-door Luxury Touring Sedan was built in August, 1989. It was based on the Chevrolet Caprice, but the Caprice was in its final year of production in 1990, so the Avanti would have to be re-engineered yet again. In July, 1989, Callaway Advanced Technology, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, was hired for a reported $500,000 to handle the design and engineering.

The plan was for the coupe and convertible to undergo similar redesigns for 1991. The 1991 models would have the Callaway-engineered chassis, and, according to the company, would also have a front end redesign. Meanwhile, the 1990 production schedule was supposed to have included three models: the convertible, the coupe, and the Luxury Touring Sedan. Nearly all sources claim that only sedans were actually built in 1990.

The Callaway chassis was supposed to have been available in March, 1990. By June, 1990, the company's estimate of the launch of the Callaway chassis had been pushed back to January, 1991—and only on a special order basis, at that. The company was likewise downplaying the future role of the classic Avanti coupe. By the late-summer of 1990, as sales of the sedan languished and the company's finances deteriorated, the Callaway chassis was indefinitely shelved.

Gary Fielding, who managed dealer development for Cafaro, blamed the company's troubles on the decision to halt coupe and convertible production in order to focus energies and resources on the sedan. When that occurred, according to Fielding, "the cash registers stopped ringing."

Worse, eight lawsuits or judgments had been filed against the company since October. And, as if that were not enough, the nation's economic picture looked decidedly bleak. The bruising recession of 1990 had continued into 1991 (and would do so into 1992, as well). The company attempted a reorganization in 1991, and a few "1991" convertibles were reportedly delivered, but, as it turned out, that was the end of the Avanti. With it died the sole survivor of the Studebaker vehicle line that had lasted 139 years.

"You rarely get a project like that. We had the bounds, the chassis, and engine, but no further restrictions. So, for days we just went wild, playing back and forth from sketches to three dimensions and back to sketches. If this car were designed today, it would have the same personality. It would be based upon a more modern chassis, simpler, lower, with state-of-the-art trim. But, it would have the same personality...You see, this isn't a styled car. It's a design. And, a design, to me, goes beyond styling."