The Packard Clipper is an automobile that was built by the Packard Motor Car Company (and by the later Studebaker-Packard Corporation) for model years 1941–1942, 1946–1947 and 1953–1957. For 1956 only, Clipper was classified as a stand-alone marque. The Clipper was introduced in April 1941, as a mid-model year entry. It was available only as a four-door sedan. The Clipper name was re-introduced in 1953, for the automaker's lowest-priced lineup. By 1955, the Clipper models were seen as diluting Packard's marketing as a luxury automobile marque. It was named for a type of sailing ship, called a clipper. For only the 1956 model year, the Clipper became a stand-alone make of automobile produced by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation. The Clipper line was aimed at the middle-price field of American automobiles that included DeSoto, Oldsmobile, Hudson, and Mercury. Following the closure of Packard's Detroit, Michigan factory in 1956, the Clipper marque was discontinued, although the Clipper name was applied to 1957 Packards that were built at Studebaker's South Bend, Indiana, factory. 1941–1942, 1946–1947 By the end of the 1930s, Packard president Max M. Gilman realized that his best efforts to improve profitability during the last lean decade had not been enough. The Packard One-Twenty had arrived in 1935 and saved the company from immediate demise; the One-Ten had followed, achieving even higher volume. Despite a strong performance in the revival year 1937, Packard sales had plummeted as the depression returned in 1938, and the 76,000 sales for the calendar year 1939 were hardly past the break-even point. They netted the company a scant half million dollars. This precarious financial state combined with the new model developments among Packard's rivals, GM's LaSalle and Cadillac Series 61, Chrysler Imperial, and the Lincoln-Zephyr, meant that Mr. Gilman needed something radically new and that he needed it in a hurry if he wanted to save the company. Introduced just eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Packard's hopes for the future rode on the new car design. The Packard Clipper represented a break from traditional styling and embodied an abrupt change in construction techniques. However, World War II intervened. It made the investment to produce one of the only all-new 1941 American cars impossible to realize in a normal marketplace. Initial reception The Clipper's market timing could not have been worse. After only 16,600 of the 1941 models were made, and a few thousand 1942s,