First, estate taxes are due only on the portion of an estate's value that exceeds the exemption level; at the 2015 exemption level of $5.43 million, a $6 million estate would owe estate taxes on $570,000 at most.. Today, 99.8 percent of estates owe no estate tax at all, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. [3] Only the estates of the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans -- roughly 2 out of every 1,000 people who die -- owe any estate tax.
However, Studebaker's financial problems were worse than the Packard executives thought. The Packard marque was phased out, and the company returned to the Studebaker Corporation name in 1962. The South Bend plant ceased production on December 20, 1963, and the last Studebaker automobile rolled off the Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, assembly line on March 16, 1966.
Studebaker's tossed-together Champ pickup tantalizes today's truck collectors. South Bend Salad - 1962 Studebaker Champ from Hemmings Classic Car. Faced with certain extinction near the end of the 1950s, Studebaker clung to solvency by building new cars and trucks out of the components already in its parts bins. The 1959 Lark was an ingenious example of this.