Over the years, a few cars have passed by in ‘In het Wild’ of which we were almost certain that they were the only car in the Netherlands. That could also just apply to this Kaiser from 1949.
Yesterday we already considered a beautiful spot from AutoWeek forum member Wouter Bregman. That Volvo P1800 was really just a warm-up for what else could be seen in one of the two photos: this Kaiser Special from 1949. As promised, we will now pay attention to that.
It wouldn’t surprise us if this Kaiser has already caused confusion among car enthusiasts on several occasions. After all, you see a sedan with clearly American lines from the late 1940s, early 1950s, but try to identify which brand it comes from. To be fair, the undersigned would not have known without checking the license plate. As mentioned, this is a Kaiser, a brand that already stopped producing passenger cars for the general public in the 1950s.
Kaiser came into existence towards the end of World War II and was initially called Kaiser-Frazer. Named after the two gentlemen who joined forces to build cars, industrialist Henry Kaiser and businessman Joseph Frazer. The latter had experience in the automotive industry and was able to work with Kaiser to form a new brand. Incidentally, you should not confuse Frazer with the British car manufacturer Frazer Nash, that had nothing to do with this Frazer.
Kaiser-Frazer started with two separate study models, one called Kaiser, the other Frazer. Not to complicate matters, the two decided to build on Frazer’s set-up: a conventional rear-wheel drive sedan. There were, however, both a Kaiser and a Frazer on the market, two apparently almost identical models, whereby the Frazer was a bit higher in the market than the Kaiser. Are we still there?
So what we have before us here is the Kaiser version of the two. A sedan with a neat but not particularly distinctive design for that time. The grille in particular was slightly simpler than that of its Frazer brother, otherwise you had to be quite aware of the differences in the equipment to be able to tell them apart. Well, you would soon expect an American from that time to have a V8 in the nose, but the Kaiser was a bit more modest in nature. Here a 3.6-liter six-in-line is serving that delivers 100 American hp’s of power (about 101 hp). In short, a block that gets the almost 1.5-ton Kaiser out of its place, but not much more than that.
A short search seems to indicate that there is one other Kaiser of this type in the Netherlands, although it is a somewhat higher-ranking Kaiser Vagabond. So there is a good chance that this is the only Kaiser Special on Dutch records. Incidentally, this example made the crossing from the US in 2000 and has been with its current owner since last summer. We suspect that it is an addition to the aforementioned Volvo, since the cars are parked right behind each other. A colorful duo!
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl