We don’t have enough early K-F on this website. Stacks of Studebakers, Packards aplenty, heaps of Hudsons, but the first-generation (1947-50) Kaisers feel somewhat retrenched. And that’s something that Henry J.’s memory just will not abide. Fortunately, this fantastic 1949 Deluxe Sedan was at the Toyota Automobile Museum in Nagoya when I visited last year.
This is ‘50s month in Japan, yet here we are with a 1949 car. But then, Willow Run planned to build so many for that year that Kaiser had to re-serialize a good 20k units as 1950 models and still had more than enough leftover bodies to keep the Frazer marque going through to 1951. So for all intents and purposes, we can pretend this is a 1950 model, because 1950 Kaisers were exactly like this, as the brochure below shows.
Perhaps I’m getting ahead of some of you as regards the history of Kaiser-Frazer. Paul wrote up a truly monumental account of it for CC, as did Aaron Severson over at Ate Up With Motor. Both should be required reading for anyone interested in cars and/or 20th Century history. The TL:DR of it all is that wealthy entrepreneur Henry J. Kaiser and automobile executive Joe W. Frazer, two very different and but equally ambitious men, teamed up in mid-1945 to create America’s only clean-sheet postwar car. Well, there was the Tucker, the Playboy, the Divan… but K-F was the only one that reached full industrial scale. Kaiser wanted something small, FWD and maybe GRP-bodied. Frazer, then in control of the remains of Graham-Paige, was working on a far simpler concept, but initially styled by Howard “Dutch” Darrin.
Ultimately, Frazer’s prototype was deemed more viable, so they went ahead with that. A slightly de-contented Kaiser-branded variant with a busier grille was created and, by May 1946, the K-F Corporation was in the car-making business. Early ads like the one above still mentioned Graham-Paige, but that did not last very long. All car assembly was to be coming out of the gigantic Willow Run works, a factory originally created for aircraft manufacturing. The initial couple of years were great, as anything on four wheels sold as soon as it left the factory. Kaiser were on a roll. (Lousy pun very much intended.)
As 1948 came to a close, Joe Frazer knew that Detroit’s big players were about to unleash a massive onslaught of new cars. Some were already in production. Frazer recommended to hunker down and keep K-F’s powder dry to respond with all-new cars for 1950-51. Henry Kaiser was completely opposed to this and went ahead with plans to manufacture 200k units of slightly facelifted cars for MY 1949. They ended up selling about 60k – the wheels were already starting to come off the newest automobile producer in the US.
Was the 1949 Kaiser a bad car? By no means. There is a lot to like. That dash, for instance, is simply superb – but then, they sort of all were, in those days, weren’t they?
It’s a big car, with loads of room inside, quite unlike those ‘70s mastodons with cramped quarters. Furthermore, it’s very tastefully upholstered, unlike some of the peculiar (or, to be positive, wildly inventive) fabrics and decorations of the 1951-53 Kaiser Dragons. The car’s external design was just as good in 1949 as it had been the previous couple of years, albeit with a cleaner grille and a touch more brightwork.
The Kaiser isn’t ugly, nor is it beautiful. It just lacks character. The straight pontoon fender look, which is hard to pull off (and was not on Darrin’s original mock-up, but added to keep costs down), is what makes the design feel anonymous. Mentally add a moustache-shaped chrome swipe on the grille and it could be a Kurvi-Tasch secret police transport from a Tintin comic book.
The hyper-generic and notoriously underpowered 3.7 litre Continental straight-6 under the hood only adds to the overall flavourlessness. It’s the store brand (K-Mart?) sedan in every way except price, which was actually rather high: retailing for around $2200 in 1949 meant this Kaiser Deluxe was pitted against the likes of the Oldsmobile 88, the DeSoto Custom, the Nash Ambassador or even, if you had a thing for expectant pachyderms, the cheapest Packard Eights.
A while back, our revered CColleague Don “Dottore” Andreina authored a great series of posts about deliberately anonymous cars. The first-generation Kaiser reminds me of this concept, although to be fair, it was anonymous by accident. At a time when you could tell a Nash (or a Studebaker or a Ford) from a Chevrolet (or a Hudson or a Plymouth) from a block away, Kaiser-Frazer sedans were distinctly undistinctive. They certainly addressed that with the second-generation big Kaiser, which is iconic and that I’m sure I’ll get to see in the metal in Tokyo sometime. They do have a thing for dragons here.
Related posts:
Curbside Classics: 1960 Cadillac, 1949 Kaiser, And A Few Others…, by Stephen Pellegrino
Car Show Outtake: 1949 Kaiser Virginian – The Non-Hardtop Hardtop, by Tom Klockau
Auction Classic: 1951 Frazer Manhattan Convertible – Four Doors Out Of Necessity, Not Virtue, by Tom Halter
Vintage Ad: 1951 Frazer Mortuary Car – Death With Dignity, by PN
It’s maybe history repeating itself with the current onslaught of Chinese cars landing in most of the world. The UK will in theory have 33 brands! And all look utterly identical, riffing off Defenders and Porsches. The bland appliance approach will end up in the same place.
There have been a couple of 47-49 Frazers come up for sale in my area in the last several months. They have been nice enough and cheap enough to intrigue me, but their generic look fails to excite. There are not many cars that can make a 49 Chrysler seem beautiful (as the ads claimed it was) but this one qualifies.
Speaking of onslaughts, required reading should be Richard Langworth’s superb “Kaiser-Fraser: The Last Onslaught on Detroit”. It’s maybe the best and most comprehensive auto history I’ve ever read.
My Dad’s WWII escort carrier was Kaiser built, a great durable ship, and the cars were evidently the same, if very conservative. Henry Kaiser was quite a guy who did many amazing things for the war effort.
Agreed. Langworth did his research in the early 1970s, when many of the principals of K-F were still alive. Unfortunately none of the Kaisers would talk to him, but he got great info from Darrin, Joe Frazer’s nephew Hickman Price, and others.
Regarding the featured car’s $2200 retail price, the January 1957 NADA Official Used Car Guide (as reprinted in Consumer Reports, Feb. 1957) listed the retail value of a 1950 Kaiser or Frazer as $150 to $225. A BOL 1950 Chevy was $280 to $315, and a 1950 Mercury was $350.
At a glance, about the only other medium-priced 1950 cars that depreciated that badly were the bathtubs from Hudson, Nash, and Packard. Of course, they were all but extinct on the new car market by then.
Nice, I wonder how much work it took to make that one so nice. Because it probably wasn’t worth it from a financial standpoint but that’s probably not too important for a museum.
Scott at Cold War Motors runs a 1949 Frazer as his summer driver. It’ll never get restored because it’s totally not worth it. But it’s enjoyable to drive:
Definitely generic 50s American car styling, rather like someone created a generic car for an ad or video game to avoid paying any licensing fees. I think the thick pillars do not do it any favours either.
They are neat as a classic car but you would probably be better off with a similar looking Plymouth for better parts supply.
Exposed “B” pillars always looks Frumpy.
If only K-F had been able to build (or source) a better engine ….
Yes, a more powerful engine.
I find the styling and design to be handsome and clean, but yeah, a bit bland. If not for the size of the cars, I can imagine them being from Europe. Some of them came with optional rear fender skirts which made them look a bit more upscale.
And there were also the comparatively rare 4-door convertibles which (like the original Lincoln Continental Cabriolet) looked very handsome with their roofs in the “up’ position.