When you’re a mid-level car division without a ton of excitement happening, what do you do to spur sales? One popular answer: Move downmarket, make a go of it with the plebes, and hope that a rush of sales makes up for whatever suffering of reputation your company may endure.
There are plenty of examples, but the most prominent two are Packard and Cadillac/La Salle. In an era when Packard sales were unsustainably low, they dreamt up the lower-line 120, a smaller, less expensive car that got the rub from Packard’s good name. Short-term, the ploy worked: For 1937, Packard sold 122,000 cars, the bulk of them the 120-series — enough to vault Packard all the way into to eighth place in the year’s sales figures. (Whether this staved off or encouraged the inevitability of the marque’s demise 20 years later is another conversation altogether.)
Meanwhile, Cadillac’s companion marque, La Salle, nearly doubled Cadillac’s sales for 1940, a year that would