Saw this while I was out checking out another car on a trip. Its a packard that has been converted into an el camino looking thing. Just curios I have seen some other cars cut up like this most of them have had some history wondering if anyone had seen one like this with the red and white paint. Shop truck maybe???
I was thinking maybe a flower car for a funeral home, but it looks like a rather crude "conversion" for that.
This is one of those instances where you think about how much work went into that, only to see the final product... depressing.
I saw one of these in a salvage yard here in SoCal earlier in the summer, except it was a Studebaker sedan of about the same vintage. The "bed" used the side panels of the car. It looked just this side of intentional and seemed purely functional and well-used. Baffling. Wouldn't you just trade your car for a decent truck, instead of creating a ****py truck from your car? Well, maybe not you, since you're here, but, you know, a normal person. Jesse.
In the '50s and '60s that happened a lot. You had people who grew up learning the depression era thinking to never throw out anything that was good, in WWII trucks got a better gas ration, and after the war into the '60s and '70s cars like that once they got old just had little to no value.. but still ran. So why not build a truck out of it? The quality of the result depended on the skill of the builder. My grandparents sold a '59 Buick 4-door round top sedan in 1969 to a guy who they said made a truck out of it. I actually still see it now and then, in June I saw about an '80 Ford Crown Vic wagon someone had turned into a pickup. Somewhat crude but not the worst I've seen (which was a mid-70's AMC Amb***ador in the junkyard that they tried to fold the roof skin down on and messed it all up). I even saw one in another junkyard, a '63 Chevy, they welded in a pickup cab back after shortening the top of a 2dr sedan, it looked like a really well done conversion before the road salt rotted it to hell.
RusyNewYorker pretty well has it nailed. Some of these cars were pretty cheap in the 60's and that Packard may have been hit in the back end and totaled as far as most folks were concerned. Cut off the back of the body, build a pickup bed and away you go with comfortable and somewhat powerful shop truck. And as he says,Model A's with the pickuip beds stuck in the back instead of a deck lid. When I lived in Texas there was a little wrecking yard out east of Waco that had an old yellow Packard ch***is (20's or early 30's) in it that had had a wrecker boom attached to the frame for the same reason. There have probably been collectors hunting that same model of ch***is for years. But you have to remember that back then there wasn't much of a market for big old heavy cars that were ten or 20 years old. The guys from the UK can probably show similar photos of some of the old luxery cars from there.
Those things were all over the place twenty years ago. I usta find em in the weeds when huntin musclecars. They were sad and generally derelict then. That's why it's odd to see them now. They'd be sportin slide in pick-up-bed campers, home made camper conversions, all sorts of inventiveness. Didn't matter what they used even. I found 2drs 4drs even Cadillac campers!
In he 60's Packards were almost worthless. Gettin some use out of one was done any way possible. Sorta like a Yugo today.
What was the movie where I believe it was Richard Prior played an early nascar driver? Their tow rig was an early 50's Caddy conversion.
That still happens in the midwest. Hell yesterday I saw it done to an astro van, along with a sherwin-williams mexican flag paint job. It was SWEEET, they went whole-hog and used a fine tooth hacksaw blade and everything. Been decades since I saw one, but remember old farmers (up thru the mid 80s) running around town in cars that had the trunklids removed, beat up old 50s & 60s junkers with snows on the back all year. The hi-tech ones had obvious suspension ***istance. Personally, I think it's no coincidence that these cars faded out at the same time domestic mini truck production boomed. Nowadays there's too many used trucks on the market of all flavors, the days of the decent car-to-truck conversion is over. Too bad really, like seeing decent ones.
Austrailia has them all over the place. Known as "Utes", short for utility. In fact an industry has grown up around converting p***enger cars into Utes. they are usually much cleaner finish than that one, but the same idea. In the US, farmers convert things all the time. In our instant gratification, consumer product based society we just don't think about it much.
Poor thing! I saw a mid to late 90's Jeep Cherokee that had been converted via hacksaw into more of a Wrangler type thingy...I almost rear-ended the car in front of me staring at it. It was worse than that Packard.
We knew a guy in the 70s with an Olds Tornado made into a wrecker. Seen lots of weird car/trucks over the years; not so much now.
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