All images courtesy the Milwaukee Art Museum.
It was meant as a cost-saving measure: Kaiser-Willys had decided to bail on building inexpensive cars in the United States and instead try its luck in South America. Still, company executives felt the need to update the cars and so brought in designer Brooks Stevens, inadvertently laying the groundwork for one of Studebaker’s classiest cars.
When Kaiser bought Willys in 1953, it essentially had two lines of cars to work with – the Kaiser full-sizes, introduced in 1951; and the Willys compacts, introduced in 1952 – as well as the Jeep four-wheel-drives. The latter group sold well, but the cars struggled, so the company formed subsidiaries in two developing nations hungry for their own auto industries, Argentina (IKA) and Brazil (Willys do Brasil), where the company could put its yet-to-be-amortized investment in tooling, dies, and molds to better use after discontinuing both the Kaiser and Willys brands in the United States in 1955.
Stevens rendering of the 1955 Willys.
Both Kaiser and Willys had worked with Stevens in the past, so the combined company again turned to the Milwaukee-based industrial designer to see how he could localize the existing designs for the South American markets. For Willys do Brasil, Stevens famously created a couple new faces for the Jeep pickup, Jeep station wagon, and the Jeepster (renamed Rural and Saci), but he also took on a redesign of the Willys Aero.
In November 1960, Stevens returned several designs, some inspired, some insipid. Some of them seemed derived from contemporary European designs, others relied more heavily on American cues downsized to fit the compact Aero chassis. Stevens was reportedly told to work with the existing Aero dies, and indeed the doors all seem the same but he took liberties with every other piece of sheetmetal in his designs.
Stevens renderings for the Willys do Brasil Aero.
From that initial round, Stevens and WdB selected the front end with the hooded headlamps and the V-split grille (which aped the grille design of the Rural and Saci) along with the upright and swept-back taillamps. As for a roofline, the more formal squared-off profile from the same rendering that contributed the taillamps beat out all the others, but it seemed WdB hadn’t yet let go of the idea of using the U.S. Aero’s rounded and very Fifties roofline. A December 1960 rendering above showed the latter, but Stevens persisted with his formal roof design, judging from the next batch of renderings from January 1961.
Stevens model for the Willys do Brasil Aero, dated January 1961.
Willys do Brasil mockups of the 1963 Willys Aero, dated April 1961.
By the end of that month, Stevens had not only finalized the design but also built a quarter-scale model of it to show WdB execs. While rounded roofline mockups remained in play until that spring, the formal roofline ultimately won out; in 1963, Willys do Brasil replaced the U.S.-design Aero with the refreshed version, which went on to become rather popular in Brazil.
If that formal roofline looks in the least bit familiar, especially with that band of trim around the base of it, that’s because, according to Glenn Adamson’s biography of Stevens, “Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World,” Studebaker’s Sherwood Egbert appreciated the work Stevens did on the Aero and asked Stevens to do the same for the 1962 Lark and Hawk.
“On the face of it, the job was impossible,” Stevens said. “We had $7 million for tooling both cars – normally about enough to tool a Plymouth door handle! We also had only six months before 1962 introduction time. But Sherwood wasn’t an automobile man. He didn’t know it was impossible.”
Thus, against all odds, the formal rooflines of the 1962 Gran Turismo Hawk and the 1962 Lark.
Stevens renderings for the Willys do Brasil Aero, dated December 1961.
Stevens wasn’t done with the Willys Aero just yet, though. Toward the end of 1961, he revisited the compact car with a more radical design, one that dispensed with WdB’s existing tooling altogether. Instead, Stevens proposed another cost-saving method: symmetrical stampings. That is, dies would be shared between the front left and right rear doors and fenders, the front right and rear left doors and fenders, and the decklid and the hood. Symmetrical hinges, latches, glass, window frames and handles would all result in cost reductions as well. The end result might have had the bulldog grin of the 1955 Chevrolet Biscayne concept car, but it also might very well have helped Willys re-enter the U.S. market after a several-year absence, which Willys had already done once before, in 1952.
Willys, however, didn’t bite. It continued to build and sell the Aero in Brazil until 1971.
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