In the summer of 1955, Edgar Kaiser Sr. provided testimony to the United State Senate, Subcommitte on Antitrust and Monopoly, regarding the car industry, specifically the history of the Kaiser Motors Company, it’s post war challenges and how/why it merged with Willys Overland.
There’s lots of interesting details in here, but my takeaway is that Kaiser didn’t believe Willys-Overland was properly leveraging the opportunities of the consumer market for four-wheel-drive vehicles. Moreover, Kaiser had a better dealer network for selling vehicles than Willys-Overland had been able to create.
So, some of this info is useful for understanding the mindset of Kaiser as to the challenges Kaiser Motors faced, before buying the assets of Willys-Overland, and the reasons the company purchased W-0. Given we will be covering the marketing aspect of this time period, it makes more sense why the new Kaiser Willys entity produced so much new literature for the sale of jeeps. Kaiser simply didn’t believe Willys-Overland execs were doing enough to promote jeeps and their capabilities to consumers.
I’ve taken snap shots of the entire testimony, which can also be found online here.
