Start with what the Packard Hawk is: a 2-door hardtop personal luxury car with 289 cuin V8, built from 1958, at the height of the post-war boom. What it meant takes a little longer.
How it came about
The Packard Hawk is a model of automobile. It was the sportiest of the four Packard-badged Studebakers produced in 1958, the final year of Packard production.
The hardware
The engine is 289 cuin V8. On the scales it comes to 3470 lb. Drive goes through a 3-speed Flightomatic automatic. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. The wheelbase is 120.5 in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Packard line-up the Packard Hawk has a clear place: the factory was Studebaker Automotive Plant, South Bend, Indiana, United States. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Mini Mini, the Fiat 500, the Nissan Skyline. Its Packard stablemates include the Packard 160 and the Packard 180.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Packard Hawk — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.