Its memory is a bit dusty now and clouded by time, but there was a time when the name Packard had all the authority of the vaunted British marque Rolls-Royce. 
While Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds set out to make cars for the “common man,” the Packard brothers, James Ward and William Doud, decided they would sell cars to men of uncommon richness. Their plan made sense because, before they had even built their first motorcar, the Packards themselves were gentlemen of substance.
Richer well-to-do’s
By the time the last decade of the 19th century rolled around, the Packard family had reached a comfortable, well-to-do standing in the town of Warren, Ohio. Moving to what was then a small village in the 1850s, the Packard clan established a lumber mill, hardware store, hotel and an iron rolling mill over the course of the next 40 years or so, providing them with a decidedly upper middle class lifestyle. Read more . . .
While their American cousins quickly produced automobiles in mass manufacture, starting with Ransom E. Olds before the turn of the last century, the British seemed perfectly satisfied to approach car building as a cottage industry. Hammer out a few here, put together a few there, and perhaps build a little bit of earnings into the enterprise. This was the ourlin for many British car builders, from Morgan to Jaguar to MG to Triumph to Aston Martin.
The P1800 Volvo he drove, was, at least at first, a British car. It was assembled by Jensen, the renowned English sports car maker, after Karmann Ghia lost out on the bidding to build the car. And in one of the most productive marketing moves in the car industry, Volvo decided to capitalize on the British connection by supplying vehicles for the British TV show, “The Saint,” which starred Roger Moore as the slightly shady, free-lance, womanizing, good guy. 
In continuous production since 1936, except for those gloomy years of World War II when Britain didn’t produce any civilian cars at all, the 4/4 has gone from contemporary to venerable to outdated to rejuvenated to out-moded to timeless over the course of its 7 decades. Now that a new millennium has dawned, with the British car industry teetering on the brink of implosion and/or suicide, it appears truly a miracle that the Morgan make has survived. Yet, survive, it has, and prospered.