This 1956 Packard pickup conversion imagines a progenitor to today's luxury trucks

Packard never built a pickup truck — if they had, maybe they'd be in business today — but that didn't dissuade the enterprising folks at Speedwell Garage in Parkton, Maryland. The result is this custom-bodied conversion created from a 1956 Packard Patrician sedan, and it credibly imagines what might have been.

Today, the concept of a luxury pickup is firmly established as a feature-laden version of a standard pickup, but in the 1950s, the budding notion of a premium hauler was different. Automakers thought the way to do so was to combine the ride and comfort of a passenger-car body with the cargo-hauling capability provided by a pickup bed — think 1957 Ford Ranchero and 1959 Chevrolet El Camino. This El Packard-ero takes that same tack.

What keeps the project firmly in period is that its creators resisted the urge to resto-mod this Packard. Granted, they snuck in a backup camera and a Vintage Air system, but this pickup otherwise looks just as '56 Packard pickup might have, had the factory turned them out.