Happy Days

In the fiercely competitive U.S. automobile industry, an ailing company seldom gets a chance for a comeback. The industry's history is studded with once famous names (Hupmobile, Chandler, Peerless, Winton, Pierce-Arrow, etc.) which went under. Nine years ago it looked as if Hudson were limping down the same rocky road to dissolution.

The war gave Hudson another chance. After a 1940 loss of $1.5 million, Hudson netted an average of nearly $2 million a year making antiaircraft guns, invasion-barge engines and aircraft parts during the war. By war's end, Hudson's President A. Edward Barit was determined to recapture Hudson's former place as a leader of the independent motormakers. He was one of the first to reconvert. In 1946 Hudson turned out 93,000 cars, nearly 6,000 more than its 1940 total. Last year Hudson boosted the total to 103,000.

Meanwhile, Ed Barit prodded his engineers to recapture the art which had given Hudson the industry's longest list of "firsts" (e.g., first aluminum pistons, first rear luggage compartment, first steering-wheel gearshift). Last fall they were finally ready with something that Barit felt to be a real advance. The new Hudson was so low that passengers step over the frame and down into it from the curb, yet it still has more headroom and width than any other car now being mass-produced. It also has a lower center of gravity. Barit was so convinced he had a salable car that he spent $18 million to retool. Last week, shy Ed Barit was beaming with good news: in 1947 Hudson had doubled its profit to $5.7 million. Better still, said Barit, by late May--thanks to an "extra 5,000 monthly tons of steel from a Government mill he had leased--Hudson could step up its 600-car daily production to 1,000 a day. At that-rate, Hudson could shoot at its 1929 alltime record of 300,000 cars.

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