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Willys-Overland Motor Co. Aero Cars of 1952-55 Gracefully playing a bad hand to the end By: Murray Stahl, March 2009 The Willys Aero Series was the last independent act of a proud company a half-century old as their new car was born. Willys had lived off of the Jeep franchise in all its different guises since 1938. The last proper sedan they had manufactured was in 1941. It’s safe to say that the Willys Aero series was created in a 13 year gestation period while Willys flirted with Jeep offshoots like the Jeepster. The Jeepster was arguably the first SUV and marketed by a larger company with more dealers may have been a hit. The Jeep line was a steady cash cow that required much less updating and innovation than a car line but Willys management didn’t pursue extensions of the Jeep line as aggressively as either Kaiser or Chrysler. Today the Jeep brand is easily the most valuable part of Chrysler Corp. and one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. It’s important to define Willys history and challenges that led up to the Aero car series. Willys, an early Success story: John North Willys had owned a sporting goods store in Elmira New York. He was a successful merchandiser and was able to ride the bicycle boom of the time to financial security. Part of this early success was due to his marketing of a motorized cycle car manufactured by George Pierce who had designed a 4-wheel bicycle like vehicle with a gasoline engine. It was impossible to ignore that there was money to be made in “horseless carriages;” and John North Willys wanted in. It wasn’t long until he added the Overland car made in Indiana to his sales company. Things were moving fast. The Willys-Overland Company had its beginnings in 1903 as a division of the Standard Wheel Company headquartered in Terra Haute Indiana. It began life as a bicycle manufacturer. By 1907 Mr. Willys was buying the entire output of the Overland Company and acting as the nationwide distributor. The recession of 1907 hit the Standard Wheel Company hard and Overland ceased production until John North Willys bailed out Overland and essentially ended up controlling the company. By early 1908 the factory was humming as Willys demonstrated just how great a promoter he was. The new company needed manufacturing space and was able to acquire the almost new plant of the Pope-Toledo Company in Ohio at a very favorable price due to the recession. The 1907 panic / recession had provided an opportunity for John North Willys to acquire a manufacturing company and a new manufacturing plant. This was the last time that recessions would help the Willys Company. John North Willys renamed the company as the Willys-Overland Motor Company and enjoyed early success. From 1912 to 1918 Willys was the second largest producer of cars in America, second only to the Ford Motor Company hitting a peak of over 140K cars in 1916. The end of the good-times: In short order Willys-Overland acquired the rights to the Knight Sleeve Valve engine, Dusenberg, the Stearn Auto Company and Electric Auto-Lite. They were overextended and the 1920 recession hit Willys hard. John North Willys was quickly jettisoned by the banking consortium that held the company’s debt. His replacement was Walter B. Chrysler who righted the corporate ship by selling off some of the recently acquired assets. The company struggled along building a model called the Whippet until the 1929 Depression hit. All manufacturing companies were severely wounded by the decade long depression but the smaller companies like Willys went in and out of bankruptcy while the larger survived on very small profits but profits nonetheless. Jeep, Willys unlikely savior: By 1938 Willys Motors was struggling to survive when an opportunity presented itself. The Army wanted bids on the design and manufacture of a small lightweight Army scout car. The aptly named American Bantam car company provided the design that the Army wanted but were deemed too small for the manufacturing so contracts were mostly awarded to Willys and Ford. Willys built close to 360K Jeeps during the war. I surmise that at some point during the war years Willys management must have realized that they had no viable product to market after the war; yikes. The prewar cars they built that are so sought after by today’s hot-rudders were greatly shunned by buyers in the late thirties. It was a combination of a weak dealer network and the fear that Willys would soon be defunct as a manufacturer. The wartime Jeep breathed a little life into the company but highlighted the fact that they had no second act; no postwar product line. Willys Overland had struggled on the fringes of the US Auto market for so long that like a sneak thief it had developed a sixth sense for survival. It maneuvered itself into position to be the one company that’s name was forever associated with Jeep. They were hungrier than Ford because unlike Ford they really had no real “next act” postwar product plans. So it came to pass that by 1942 Willys began planning a civilian Jeep, the CJ. They began using scarce assets to buy ads promoting a main street USA version of the Jeep as the perfect postwar vehicle; the ads always featured the Willys name prominently lest anyone think that the Jeep was a Ford product. The New York Times had a back page story in May of 1943 that the Fair Trade Commission agreed that Willys-Overland claimed to have created the Jeep, that was false but by then Willys had appropriated title to the Jeep name in the public’s perception through advertising; perception became reality. A short, nasty court fight in 1943 left Willys free to create the image of Willys Jeep, the only Jeep. After VJ day Willys produced open Jeeps that were little changed from their military siblings and the very innovative Jeepster. The Jeepster was many decades ahead of the SUV craze and bucked the trend of the day by not even offering an automatic transmission. Jeeps and Jeepsters allowed Willys a niche that kept them alive and safe from the big-3. They were able to plod along but had no money to add to the line. Chrysler and to a lesser extent Kaiser very successfully accomplished this after Willys was acquired. Willys Aero Cars enter the fray: As Willys hit the market in 1952 the little Rambler was selling at a 60,000-car run-rate while Kaiser’s Henry-J approached 50K units. The all-new Hudson Jet had just entered the birth canal and would soon be a competitor. It’s worth noting that this was an era when Fedora hats were still cool and a small car still seemed vaguely un-American but here was this flurry of small car efforts. There had been forays made before to create a small-car market by Crosley and American Bantam but their production totals didn’t even approach Chevrolets weekly rounding error. It was only the little Rambler that seemed to be defining a niche business in small. Rambler had been forced into building only “loaded” high-end little cars by the rationing for the war effort in the fifties. The well-appointed little cars sold and even more important, they were profitable. It’s easy to make a case that this one fact was responsible for Henry-J adding a glove box and trunk and for the Hudson-Jet to somewhat mitigate its awkward looks with quite nice interior appointments. Even today its not generally understood how difficult it is to create a chic, fashionable automobile of small stature. People usually view their cars as extensions of their personality and a successful “small” car cannot simply convey “cheap” it must also generally make a fashion statement something like “my owner is a quirky, fun loving person who enjoys life.” The cars that have accomplished this are very few. The open Jeep, the BMC Mini, VW Beetle, Citroen 2CV were all cars that conveyed an aura to their drivers. They each were manufactured for decades with pretty many only incremental changes. Drivers of these icons were able to pull up to the country club valet with their Jeep and not be thought of as ordinary. Quirky, fashionable chic is hard to convey and its interesting that it was mostly accomplished with smaller, economical vehicles. Willys had somewhat absorbed the lesson that small cars need not so austere as to scream that the owner was a cheapskate. They must have noted that “stripped” full size cars like the Kaiser Carolina and the forerunners of the Studebaker Scotsmen could be sold only to bachelor hermits in northern Minnesota. These strippers devalued the company franchise yet sold poorly and weren’t profitable. Cute was what sold and Rambler did cute wonderfully just as Volkswagen and the Mini would exploit it in later years; make it cute enough and it signifies an attractive quirkiness in the car buyer, not cheapness. The Willys Aero cars would split the difference between the large and small car market by designing the car around a 108-inch wheelbase placing it firmly in the middle of the size range. The Rambler sported a 100 inch WB for its 2-door but a 108 inch for the 4-door; the Hudson Jet sat on a 105 Wheel base. This was truly the first midsize automobile. As the big three offerings were growing with each model year. The first year Aero came only in a two door sedan version with a standard transmission. In 54 they added a four door and a hardtop convertible and all could be had with a 4-speed hydromatic tranny. The interesting part is that while Chevy was relegated to only the 2-speed powerglide Willys was able to get GM to source their 4-speed for the Aero. The Automobile testers of the time were generally very positive about the Aero car praising the handling, acceleration and interior appointments. The Willys straight six engine had been updated to an OHV configuration in 1950 and the little four main bearing F-head engine provided durability, economy and performance. It was the engine sourced for the Kaiser Henry-J and considered a “good mill” in the industry. The styling was quite mainline and conventional. The Aero began with a split windshield and only a 2-door sedan was offered. The 53s had one- piece windshields, a 4-door model and a Hardtop convertible. The Murray Body Company made all the Aero bodies. Willys didn’t have the stamping capacity or equipment until Kaiser Industries took over. In 1954 Willys gained the Kaiser 227 CID Flat head straight six which made for a “pocket rocket” sort of performer. The Aero cars were good vehicles; in fact a Motor-Life test driver liked it enough to buy one for his personal use. It deserved better than the 3-year sales total of about 55,000 cars. There were many reasons why this generally good automobile failed but the high cost of manufacture triggered an uncompetitive sales price has to lead the list. The Willys Eagle was priced at about $2155, which was pretty much the cost of a Chevrolet Convertible. A cheap Chevy left the dealer for only $1537. Consider that an automobile has upwards of 14,000 parts without even considering the myriad of small sub-parts making up a larger component; I.E. levers and springs in the window mechanism, bolts and nut on the starter. It is arguably the most costly, complex product ever put into mass production; it’s manufacturing creates complex engineering, design and timing problems even beyond its huge overhead structure and marginal returns All these parts have to be engineered, priced, tooled and planned out to a cost and time budget. The small makers were always faced with the key question of how many units would be sold as opposed to how many would be needed to pay for the tooling. The product planners in a GM division would be dividing a $500,000 bumper die set by a two million unit run for a tooling cost of $.25 a bumper while the independents would optimistically use a divisor of 200,000 cars. Their best case then was a $2.50 tooling cost. This simplification shows a ten times greater cost advantage for GM than for one of the independent companies and would be multiplied over thousands of parts. One of the consequences of this would be a much longer life span for parts; the 1953 Studebaker bumpers were still in use at the end in 1964 as were the basic front fenders. Hudson at the end was using an engine designed in the early thirties. Making competitive cars requires very deep pockets. General Motors was a colossus in the fifties; able to whipsaw the independents by promoting style and design change. Their influence was so toxic that they went out of their way to not harm the smaller competitors but “the law of unintended consequences,” caused the end of the independents. As Henry Kaiser said, "We were not surprised that we had to toss $50 million into the automotive pool, we were surprised that it disappeared without a ripple" and so it goes. Along with the high number of individual parts to engineer and tool there is the product life problem. Automobiles aren’t a product like a tractor that once engineered can have a long model run with only minor tweaking. The competition by the early fifties was brutal quickly heading towards only a 2 or 3-year model run. Automobiles were fast becoming a fashion industry, more akin to Woman’s clothes that quickly move out of style than to tractors or Jeeps. Market share was king because the major companies knew that once a certain level of sales was reached, fixed cost was overcome and profits galloped under the spell of fully amortized equipment. Of course a poor selling model was always possible. While the big three could easily weather the immediate, emergency redesign of a marketplace failure it was a catastrophic problem for the independents. Willys other marketing problems revolved around its History and dealer group. Willys last real car was made before the war and now this new car was presented to the Dealers to sell twelve years later. Most Willys dealers were located in rural, farm areas and had become very comfortable marketing Jeeps. The Jeep of the time was a stand-alone vehicle with no real competition in its niche. They marketed it to people that had a need for rugged 4-wheel drive austere transportation. Their customers weren’t concerned that they were driving a noisy, drafty crude vehicle that only vaguely resembled a car. They were a small group and giving them a car to sell was akin to trying to peddle panties in Home Depot. See “Jeep, Improbable survivor” on my site for the full story of the Jeep: https://sites.google.com/site/intriguingautomotivehistories/ The Willys Aero models have become postscripts in History but they were good to great cars. In point of fact Chrysler seriously considered resurrecting the Aero-Willys as a small Plymouth in 1955. After a hiatus Kaiser shipped the dies and tooling to Brazil where they were built for more than a decade. A major restyling was done in the sixties and the Aero side view now resembled an Ambassador with a Thunderbird roof line. The car was finally a success in production until the early seventies. EPILOGUE The Willys Aero, Henry-J, Rambler and Hudson Jet were all created on meager budgets and may have too expensive to be wildly successful but placed next to the sorry example of small cars produced by Ford and GM in later years they were models of Design perfection. The Vega burned oil from day one while keeping you awake rusting in your driveway. Along with the Pinto, these two cars were major reasons for the decline in how customers saw the North American car Manufacturers; you simply couldn’t look at one of these cars a year old and not just shake your head. They were perfectly horrid examples of design malpractice from the Yugo-school of customer satisfaction. The Aero was overpriced when compared to it’s peers but it was a solid, dependable, comfortable automobile that never became the comedians punch line that the Vega and Pinto were.

 

Willys-Overland Motor Co. Aero Cars of 1952-55
By: Murray D. Stahl, September 14th, 2009

Gracefully playing a bad hand to the end

The Willys Aero Series was the last independent act of a proud company a half-century old as their new car was born. Willys had lived off of the Jeep franchise in all its different guises since 1938. The last proper sedan they had manufactured was in 1941. It’s safe to say that the Willys Aero series was created in a 13 year gestation period while Willys flirted with Jeep offshoots like the Jeepster. The Jeepster was arguably the first SUV and marketed by a larger company with more dealers may have been a hit. The Jeep line was a steady cash cow that required much less updating and innovation than a car line but Willys management didn’t pursue extensions of the Jeep line as aggressively as either Kaiser, AMC or Chrysler. Today the Jeep brand is easily the most valuable part of Chrysler Corp. and one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. It’s important to define Willys history and the challenges that led up to the Aero car series.

Willys, an early Success story:
John North Willys had owned a sporting goods store in Elmira New York. He was a successful merchandiser and was able to ride the bicycle boom of the time to financial security. Part of this early success was due to his marketing of a motorized cycle car manufactured by George Pierce who had designed a 4-wheel bicycle like vehicle with a gasoline engine. It was impossible to ignore that there was money to be made in “horseless carriages;” and John North Willys wanted in. It wasn’t long until he added the Overland car made in Indiana to his sales company. Things were moving fast.

The Willys-Overland Company had its beginnings in 1903 as a division of the Standard Wheel Company headquartered in Terra Haute Indiana. It began life as a bicycle manufacturer. By 1907 Mr. Willys was buying the entire output of the Overland Company and acting as the nationwide distributor. The recession of 1907 hit the Standard Wheel Company hard and Overland ceased production until John North Willys bailed out Overland and essentially ended up controlling the company. By early 1908 the factory was humming as Willys demonstrated just how great a promoter he was.

The new company needed manufacturing space and was able to acquire the almost new plant of the Pope-Toledo Company in Ohio at a very favorable price due to the recession. The 1907 panic / recession had provided an opportunity for John North Willys to acquire a manufacturing company and a new manufacturing plant. This was the last time that recessions would help the Willys Company.

John North Willys renamed the company as the Willys-Overland Motor Company and enjoyed early success. From 1912 to 1918 Willys was the second largest producer of cars in America, second only to the Ford Motor Company hitting a peak of over 140K cars in 1916.

The end of the good-times:
In short order Willys-Overland acquired the rights to the Knight Sleeve Valve engine, Dusenberg, the Stearn Auto Company and Electric Auto-Lite. They were overextended and the 1920 recession hit Willys hard. John North Willys was quickly jettisoned by the banking consortium that held the company’s debt. His replacement was Walter B. Chrysler who righted the corporate ship by selling off some of the recently acquired assets.

The company struggled along building a model called the Whippet until the 1929 Depression hit. All manufacturing companies were severely wounded by the decade long depression but the smaller companies like Willys went in and out of bankruptcy while the larger survived on very small profits but profits nonetheless.

Jeep, Willys unlikely savior:
By 1938 Willys Motors was struggling to survive when an opportunity presented itself. The Army wanted bids on the design and manufacture of a small lightweight Army scout car. The aptly named American Bantam car company provided the design that the Army wanted but were deemed too small for the manufacturing so contracts were mostly awarded to Willys and Ford. Willys built close to 360K Jeeps during the war.

I surmise that at some point during the war years Willys management must have realized that they had no viable product to market after the war; yikes. The prewar cars they built that are so sought after by today’s hot-rodders were greatly shunned by buyers in the late thirties. It was a combination of a weak dealer network and the fear that Willys would soon be defunct as a manufacturer. The wartime Jeep breathed a little life into the company but highlighted the fact that they had no second act; no postwar product line.

Willys Overland had struggled on the fringes of the US Auto market for so long that like a sneak thief it had developed a sixth sense for survival. It maneuvered itself into position to be the one company that’s name was forever associated with Jeep. They were hungrier than Ford because unlike Ford they really had no real “next act” postwar product plans. So it came to pass that by 1942 Willys began planning a civilian Jeep, the CJ. They began using scarce assets to buy ads promoting a main street USA version of the Jeep as the perfect postwar vehicle; the ads always featured the Willys name prominently lest anyone think that the Jeep was a Ford product. The New York Times had a back page story in May of 1943 that the Fair Trade Commission agreed that Willys-Overland claimed to have created the Jeep, that was false but by then Willys had appropriated title to the Jeep name in the public’s perception through advertising; perception became reality. A short, nasty court fight in 1943 left Willys free to create the image of Willys Jeep, the only Jeep.

After VJ day Willys produced open Jeeps that were little changed from their military siblings and the very innovative Jeepster. The Jeepster was many decades ahead of the SUV craze and bucked the trend of the day by not even offering an automatic transmission. Jeeps and Jeepsters allowed Willys a niche that kept them alive and safe from the big-3. They were able to plod along but had no money to add to the line. Chrysler and to a lesser extent Kaiser very successfully accomplished this after Willys was acquired.

Willys Aero Cars enter the fray:
As Willys hit the market in 1952 the little Rambler was selling at a 60,000-car run-rate while Henry-J approached 50K units. The all-new Hudson Jet had just entered the birth canal and would soon be a competitor. It’s worth noting that this was an era when Fedora hats were still cool and a small car still seemed vaguely un-American but here was this flurry of small car efforts. There had been forays made before to create a small-car market by Crosley and American Bantam but their production totals didn’t even approach Chevrolets weekly rounding error. It was only the little Rambler that seemed to be defining a niche business in small. Rambler had been forced into building only “loaded” high-end little cars by the rationing for the war effort in the fifties. The well-appointed little cars sold and even more important, they were profitable. It’s easy to make a case that this one fact was responsible for Henry-J adding a glove box and trunk and for the Hudson-Jet to somewhat mitigate its awkward looks with quite nice interior appointments.

Even today its not generally understood how difficult it is to create a chic, fashionable automobile of small stature. People usually view their cars as extensions of their personality and a successful “small” car cannot simply convey “cheap” it must also generally make a fashion statement something like “my owner is a quirky, fun loving person who enjoys life.” The cars that have accomplished this are very few. The open Jeep, the BMC Mini, VW Beetle, Citroen 2CV were all cars that conveyed an aura to their drivers. They each were manufactured for decades with pretty many only incremental changes. Drivers of these icons were able to pull up to the country club valet with their Jeep and not be thought of as ordinary. Quirky, fashionable chic is hard to convey and its interesting that it was mostly accomplished with smaller, economical vehicles.

Willys had somewhat absorbed the lesson that small cars need not so austere as to scream that the owner was a cheapskate. They must have noted that “stripped” full size cars like the Kaiser Carolina and the forerunners of the Studebaker Scotsmen could be sold only to bachelor hermits in northern Minnesota. These strippers devalued the company franchise yet sold poorly and weren’t profitable.

Cute was what sold and Rambler did cute wonderfully just as Volkswagen and the Mini would exploit it in later years; make it cute enough and it signifies an attractive quirkiness in the car buyer, not cheapness. The Willys Aero cars would split the difference between the large and small car market by designing the car around a 108-inch wheelbase placing it firmly in the middle of the size range. The Rambler sported a 100 inch WB for its 2-door but a 108 inch for the 4-door; the Hudson Jet sat on a 105 inch Wheel base.

This was truly the first midsize automobile. As the big three offerings were growing with each model year.

The first year Aero came only in a two door sedan version with a standard transmission. In 54 they added a four door and a hardtop convertible and all could be had with a 4-speed hydromatic tranny. The interesting part is that while Chevy was relegated to only the 2-speed powerglide Willys was able to get GM to source their 4-speed for the Aero.

The Automobile testers of the time were generally very positive about the Aero car praising the handling, acceleration and interior appointments. The Willys straight six engine had been updated to an OHV configuration in 1950 and the little four main bearing F-head engine provided durability, economy and performance. It was the engine sourced for the Kaiser Henry-J and considered a “good mill” in the industry.

The styling was quite mainline and conventional. The Aero began with a split windshield and only a 2-door sedan was offered. The 53s had one- piece windshields, a 4-door model and a Hardtop convertible.

The Murray Body Company made all the Aero bodies. Willys didn’t have the stamping capacity or equipment until Kaiser Industries took over. In 1954 Willys gained the Kaiser 227 CID Flat head straight six which made for a “pocket rocket” sort of performer.

As Kaiser purchased Willys it has to be noted that this was really a kiss of death. Willys had always been in the black with the Jeep while K-F had always been a high cost manufacturer. In 1950 K-F lost $13 million while selling 151,000 cars, Packard made $5 million on 72K units and Hudson was $12 million in the black on sales of 144K cars. By 1952 K-F had a record of zero profit from 1948 through 52. Kaiser like a lot of automotive companies like Studebaker had become far too used to working on the “Cost-Plus” Government contracts that had supported many inefficiencies from 1940 through 1953.

The Aero cars were good vehicles; in fact a Motor-Life test driver liked it enough to buy one for his personal use. It deserved better than the 3-year sales total of about 55,000 cars.

There were many reasons why this generally good automobile failed but the high cost of manufacture that triggered an uncompetitive sales price has to lead the list. The Willys Eagle was priced at about $2155, which was pretty much the cost of a “Top of the line” Chevrolet Convertible. A cheap Chevy left the dealership for only $1537. Willys decision to introduce the Aero only as a 2-door was a mistake. The Hardtop was pretty enough to form a positive first impression and 4-door cars are the sales stalwarts of most lines. Studebaker made the same basic mistake in 1953 when they introduced a very pretty, close to fine art, Coupe that looked ungainly when the style was transformed to a sedan on a smaller wheelbase. The swoopy, lithe looking Lowey coupe looked awkward and ungainly as a sedan. Studebaker had ignored the fact that the 4-door sedan traditionally was 65% of sales. The coupe was an artistic success while the loss of sedan sales was a mistake that Studebaker never fully recovered from. Willys should have led with the high-end cars.

Consider that an automobile has upwards of 14,000 parts without even considering the myriad of small sub-parts making up a larger component; I.E. levers and springs in the window mechanism, bolts and nut on the starter. It is arguably the most costly, complex product ever put into mass production; it’s manufacturing creates complex engineering, design and timing problems even beyond its huge overhead structure and marginal returns

All these parts have to be engineered, priced, tooled and planned out to a cost and time budget. The small makers were always faced with the key question of how many units would be sold as opposed to how many would be needed to pay for the tooling. The product planners in a GM division would be dividing a $500,000 bumper die set by a two million unit run for a tooling cost of $.25 a bumper while the independents would optimistically use a divisor of 200,000 cars. Their best case then was a $2.50 tooling cost. This simplification shows a ten times greater cost advantage for GM than for one of the independent companies and would be multiplied over thousands of parts. One of the consequences of this would be a much longer life span for parts; the 1953 Studebaker bumpers were still in use at the end in 1964 as were the basic front fenders. Hudson at the end was using an engine designed in the early thirties. Making competitive cars requires very deep pockets. General Motors was a colossus in the fifties; able to whipsaw the independents by promoting style and design change. Their influence was so toxic that they went out of their way to not harm the smaller competitors but “the law of unintended consequences,” caused the end of the independents. As Henry Kaiser said, "We were not surprised that we had to toss $50 million into the automotive pool, we were surprised that it disappeared without a ripple" and so it goes.

Along with the high number of individual parts to engineer and tool there is the product life problem. Automobiles aren’t a product like a tractor that once engineered can have a long model run with only minor tweaking. The competition by the early fifties was brutal quickly heading towards only a 2 or 3-year model run. Automobiles were fast becoming a fashion industry, more akin to Woman’s clothes that quickly move out of style than to tractors or Jeeps. Market share was king because the major companies knew that once a certain level of sales was reached, fixed cost was overcome and profits galloped under the spell of fully amortized equipment. Of course a poor selling model was always possible. While the big three could easily weather the immediate, emergency redesign of a marketplace failure it was a catastrophic problem for the independents.

Willys other marketing problems revolved around its History and dealer group. Willys last real car was made before the war and now this new car was presented to the Dealers to sell twelve years later. Most Willys dealers were located in rural, farm areas and had become very comfortable marketing Jeeps.

The Jeep of the time was a stand-alone vehicle with no real competition in its niche. They marketed it to people that had a need for rugged 4-wheel drive austere transportation. Their customers weren’t concerned that they were driving a noisy, drafty crude vehicle that only vaguely resembled a car. Now they were being asked to sell a family sedan, no realistic chance of success. They were a small group and giving them a car to sell was akin to trying to peddle panties in Home Depot.

The Willys Aero models have become postscripts in History but they were good to great cars. In point of fact Chrysler seriously considered resurrecting the Aero-Willys as a small Plymouth in 1955.

After a hiatus Kaiser shipped the dies and tooling to Brazil where they were built for more than a decade. A major restyling was done in the sixties and the Aero side view now resembled an Ambassador with a Thunderbird roof line. The car was finally a success in production until the early seventies.

EPILOGUE
The Willys Aero, Henry-J, Rambler and Hudson Jet were all created on meager budgets and may have been too expensive to be wildly successful but placed next to the sorry example of small cars produced by Ford and GM in later years they were models of Design perfection. The Vega burned oil from day one while keeping you awake rusting in your driveway. Along with the Pinto, these two cars were major reasons for the decline in how customers saw the North American car Manufacturers; you simply couldn’t look at one of these cars a year old and not just shake your head.

They were perfectly horrid examples of design malpractice from the Yugo-school of customer satisfaction. The Aero was overpriced when compared to it’s peers but it was a solid, dependable, comfortable automobile that never became the comedians punch line that the Vega and Pinto were.

The Willys Aero, Henry-J, Rambler and Hudson Jet had various levels of success without becoming the absolute embarrassment that the Vega and Pinto were. Ford and GM had a hundred-fold of design resources and had produced junk; the Independent manufactures by comparison had nothing to be ashamed of.
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