The Avanti is a personal luxury coupe. A halo car for the maker, it was marketed as "America's only four-passenger high-performance personal car."

Described as "one of the more significant milestones of the postwar industry",:   the Raymond Loewy-designed car offered safety features and high-speed performance. Called “the fastest production car in the world” upon its introduction, a modified Avanti reached over 170 mph (270 km/h) with its supercharged 289-cubic-inch (4,740 cm3) R3 engine at the Bonneville Salt Flats. In all, it broke 29 world speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Following Studebaker's discontinuation of the model, a series of five owner arrangements continued to manufacture and market derivatives of the Avanti model through 2006.

The name Avanti in Italian means "forward" or "onward".

The Avanti was developed at the direction of Studebaker president, Sherwood Egbert, who took over in February 1961. The car's design theme was "allegedly doodled by Egbert on the proverbial back of an envelope during an airplane flight." Egbert's 'doodle' was to answer Ford's Thunderbird and an attempt to improve the automaker's sagging performance. Designed by Raymond Loewy's team of Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews, and John Ebstein on a 40-day crash program, the Avanti featured a radical fiberglass body mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark 109-inch convertible chassis and powered by a modified 289 Hawk engine. A Paxton supercharger was offered as an option.

In eight days the stylists finished a "clay scale model with two different sides: one a two-place sports car, the other a four-seat GT coupe." Tom Kellogg, a young California stylist hired for this project by Loewy, "felt it should be a four-seat coupe." "Loewy envisioned a low-slung, long-hood-short-deck semi-fastback coupe with a grilleless nose and a wasp-waisted curvature to the rear fenders, suggesting a supersonic aircraft."

The Avanti's complex body shape "would have been both challenging and prohibitively expensive to build in steel" with Studebaker electing to mold the exterior panels in glass-reinforced plastic (fiberglass), outsourcing the work to Molded Fiberglass Body in Ashtabula, Ohio — the same company that built the fiberglass panels for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953.

The Avanti featured front disc-brakes that were British Dunlop designed units, made under license by Bendix, "the first American production model to offer them." It was one of the first bottom breather designs where air enters from under the front of the vehicle rather than via a conventional grille, a design feature much more common after the 1980s.