Packard One-Twenty

Among the 34 Packard entries in the MotorJury library, the Packard One-Twenty holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Packard One-Twenty, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Packard One-Twenty reads like this: the record lists its engine as 257 cuin Straight-eight engine / I8 (1935) / 282 cuin Straight-eight engine / I8 (1936–37); kerb weight is recorded at 3688 lb; drive goes through 3-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Packard story

Within Packard's own catalogue the Packard One-Twenty sits alongside the Packard 160, the Packard 180, the Packard 200, the Packard 300. The record names the Packard Light Eight as its predecessor and the Packard 200 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Packard Automotive Plant, Detroit, Michigan, United States.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

Reading a sparse record honestly

Some pages in this library brim with specifications; others, like corners of every archive, are thin. The honest response to a thin record is to say so, not to pad it. What is shown here is exactly what the public record supports today — and because the harvest re-runs nightly, the page you are reading is the fullest version of this car's open record that existed the last time the site was built.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Packard One-Twenty was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.