I got my hands on a copy of automotive historian Richard Langworth’s THE LAST ONSLAUGHT ON DETROIT, a premature title if ever there was one.
I come by my interest in small, quirky, independent car companies honestly. My family has owned about 20 American Motors products over the years – Nash, Jeep, AMC, Rambler, and one of the Renault Franco-American mistakes. I’ve owned three AMC’s.
Kaiser-Frazer was founded in 1945 by shipbuilding magnate Henry J, Kaiser and automotive industry veteran (Graham-Paige, Chrysler, Willys) Joe Frazer. It only lasted in pure form until 1953 although their body dies made their way all across the planet, wafting as it were on the wind.
Let’s make a very complicated story short:
Kaiser-Frazer should have made it. That they didn’t is proof that industrial giants and geniuses are often the most efficient at failing in horrific ways.
The first mistake was buying Willow Run, the world’s largest building, for its manufacturing and design. Willow Run had built bombers during World War II, so it had to be stripped and rebuilt for body presses and making the vehicles.
Willow Run was impressive, and it helped sell tons of Kaiser-Frazer stock early on, but it was too large for Kaiser’s eventual miniscule market share. It was a very white elephant.
The cars they sold initially were beautiful, but nobody thought of the engine.
It was a flathead Continental straight 6 at a time when average Americans felt entitled to V8’s. It formerly had been used by farmers to pump water and run generators. It suffered from vapor lock and very low power. My wife’s family bought a new 1964 Checker Marathon that came with essentially this same engine, and it was defective right out of the box and had to be replaced by Mace Motors in Canton, NY, with a Chevy V8.
The cars got a bad rap for being lemons. They may or may not have been true; all cars were pretty much lemons in the 1950’s.
Over time, the company lost so much money that they couldn’t invest in new bodies. The originally clean, svelte bodies became baroque to the extent that they reminded people of Victorian sitting rooms. The formerly crisp handling, albeit with ridiculously hard steering, turned soft and smooshy.
The dealerships were bad. Henry Kaiser, his son Edgar, and Joe Frazer signed up everybody and anybody as dealers. It’s a wonder that they didn’t sign up my grandmother as a dealer. (She would have been one of the better ones.). They thought more dealers was better than good dealers.
Mainly, they just couldn’t turn a profit for more than a quarter or two, and losses were staggering.
Administration was top-heavy, and loaded with Kaiser’s shipbuilding executives rather than the more pragmatic Frazer car industry veterans. And too much money went to the style and design and interior and color people. The cars started out beautiful, but the very things that made them beautiful were so overboard that eventually they could not be sustained.
Finally, Henry J. Kaiser had a bug up his ass about building a cheap car “for the masses”. (Remind you of anyone else?) The car he came up with was too expensive for buyers and it meant that further growth of the more mainstream models could not be afforded.
The “economy” car was appropriately named the “Henry J”. It was beaten up in sales by the Nash/AMC Rambler. That it was almost as ugly as the early Ramblers was quite an accomplishment.
Kaiser bought Willys-Overland, the famous Jeep makers, as it was apparent that the Kaiser stuff was failing in the years of the Ford/GM price wars.
So it’s possible to believe that Kaiser-Frazer never went out of business, but that between Kaiser buying Willys and then Jeep’s sale to American Motors in 1970 and AMC’s sale to Chrysler in 1988 and Chrysler’s “merger” with Mercedes and then Chrysler’s acquisition by Cerebus and later the mess that is Stellantis, K-F lives on in Jeeps.
Maybe.
