The Kaiser-Frazer Corporation
Ironically, to Henry J. Kaiser and most other U.S. industrialists, World War II was the best news in years. Heavy industries such as Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards raked in tremendous profits from military contracts during this time, rocketing the U.S. economy out of the depression. As the war drew to a close, however, Kaiser saw his shipbuilding profits begin to sink. He recognized that civilian products, not military ones, would soon be in huge demand. and that the biggest demand of all would be for automobiles. No civilian automobile production had taken place between December of 1941 and the close of the war. The public, having made do with dreary 1942 models for three long years, was auto-starved.
From Bombers to Kaisers
With a tidy mountain of shipbuilding and steel profits. Kaiser formed a partnership with industrialist Joseph W. Frazer and created what became the last U.S.-made automobiles to pose a serious challenge to Detroit’s Big Three. They were the Kaiser and the Frazer, designed in Kaiser’s Emeryville research center at 1301 59th Street, and for a few shining years they had GM. Ford, and Chrysler playing catch-up.
Before the first Kaiser and Frazer automobiles were released to K-F showrooms in 1946, vast sums of money were spent researching and designing both the car and its manufacturing facilities. To the latter end. Kaiser acquired an idle B-24 bomber factory in Willow Run. Michigan, and refitted it with the most modem assembly line in America. Driven by the lure of huge profits. the entire plant was completed in eight months.
The Upstart from Willow Run
The design of the Kaiser and Frazer automobiles is a milestone of another sort. Kaiser was anxious to catch Detroit off guard. and demanded that his car be far in advance of what the Big Three could offer, saddled as they were with their existing production facilities. Both the Kaiser and Frazer (which were essentially identical) were designed and mocked up in Kaiser’s Emeryville facility under the watchful eye of Henry Kaiser himself. It was here that Kaiser-Frazer engineers developed the first fenderless car designs of the postwar era, and also beat Detroit in the race to release them. With demand fueled by the automobile shortage, these clean-lined cars were a tremendous hit with the public. Detroit scrambled to catch the upstart from Willow Run.
The Inexorable Decline
By 1949 however, the immediate auto shortage had been largely satiated. Worse, the Kaiser’s design, once radically new, was soon overshadowed by the even sleeker designs of Studebaker, Hudson, and Oldsmobile. In the following two years, the rest of Detroit, backed by far more capital than even Henry Kaiser could muster, would introduce radically new cars priced far below those of the independents. Kaiser and Frazer sales began a slow but inexorable decline.
In 1951, Kaiser-Frazer dropped the failing Frazer marque and concentrated on the more successful Kaisers. Kaiser superbly restyled its cars for the 1951 model year. They were among the lowest priced, best appointed. and safest cars in America. It was Kaiser that first introduced pop-out safety windshields, wraparound tail lamps, high driver visibility, and the padded dash to American drivers. Unfortunately, those drivers were more interested in what the Big Three had to offer: Power.
Left in the Dust
While Kaiser was still plodding along with its modest six-cylinder engine. Detroit had developed evermore potent V-8 engines which would leave any Kaiser in the dust. Safety was forgotten, and so was Kaiser’s sales campaign. In 1951, 140,000 Kaisers were sold: by 1952 that figure had plummeted to 32,000. In 1954, Kaiser gamely offered a supercharger option for its straight-six engine in a last-ditch effort to compete with the V-8s. It was not a winner. to put it mildly. In 1955, the make’s last year, a pitiful 1,291 Kaisers left the showroom floor. It was a sad end to a once-stellar success, and it marked the last real challenge to the Big Three’s iron grip on auto sales until the rise of the Japanese imports. Henry Kaiser was no fool, however. Though the Kaiser was discontinued in the United States, the plant was dismantled and reconstructed in Argentina. where the very same car was profitably produced as the Kaiser Carabela until 1962. The car born in Emeryville in 1945 is still rolling down the streets of Buenos Aires today.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
