1920 Packard Twin-Six Custom Town Car

Custom Built for Arthur Atwater Kent

New York Auto Show Car

Millionaire manufacturer Arthur Atwater Kent never likes to ride in the same car two days in a row.  When he wasn’t behind the wheel, he was being driven.  His magnificent Packard Twin-Six Town Car accommodated a footman in addition to the chauffer and five passengers.  It was a familiar sight on the streets of Philadelphia during the Roaring Twenties, its varnished back silhouette gliding silently across the city with the regal authority befitting a titan of industry.

Since its announcement in 1915, the Twin-Six, or twelve-cylinder Packard, had reached perfection.  Kent ordered a custom chassis with a 145-ince wheelbase, nice inches longer than the luxury chassis listed for $4550.  Fleetwood, then a private coachbuilding form located near Reading, Pennsylvania, crafted a one-of-a-kind body that was higher and longer than any other Packard of its type.  The coachbuilder introduced styling innovations including 35 inch steel disc wheels, drum headlamps, a double layered top that lowered to transform the limousine into a touring car, and steel bumpers encased in rolled rubber.  Fleetwood’s treatment was so popular that Packard adopted the drum headlamps and rolled bumper as standard features in later models.  When the car was proudly shown at the 1920 New York Salon, it epitomized the craft of American coachbuilding and rivaled or surpassed the most luxurious Rolls Royce of the period.

Atwater Kent’s genius for invention, fused with the rare ability to build and sells his creations, catapulted him to fortune and fame, allowing him, as he likes to say, to “live the simple life, on a grand scale.”  In 1902, at the age of twenty-nine, he founded the Atwater Kent Manufacturing Works in Philadelphia and recorded instant success by producing battery voltmeters.  Long before his radios made him a household name, Kent pioneered many automotive advances, among them ignition systems and electric started.  Every car on the road owed some part of its origin to his creative brilliance.