After World War II, with the great need for transportation, many newcomers entered the automobile industry looking for success. Henry J. Kaiser, a shipbuilder during the war, was looking forward to the postwar period. He anticipated the needs for houses, medical care, and automobiles; and “built” all three. For his automobile work, he took on a partner; the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation was created in 1945 as a joint venture between the Henry J. Kaiser Corporation and Graham-Paige Motors, whose CEO, Joseph W. Frazer, also became president of Kaiser-Frazer.
Joseph Frazer worked his way up in Packard, rising from manual labor to the executive ranks. Frazer moved to General Motors, then to Chrysler Corporation; while at Chrysler, Frazer set up the sales program for DeSoto and coined the “Plymouth” name for the corporation’s base-line make. In 1938, Frazer left Chrysler to become President of Willys-Overland until 1943. In 1945, Frazer and his associates ended up in control of Graham-Paige.
In January 1946, two well-kept secrets were revealed to the public in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City: non-running prototypes of the new Frazer and the revolutionary Kaiser K85 family car with front-wheel drive. While there ultimately was a running front wheel drive Kaiser (even driven by Tom McCahill in 1946), the development time was too short to bring it to production, and there were problems with the Packaged Power front wheel drive unit; the final decision was to use the same body and drivetrain for both the Frazer and Kaiser.
Jerry Mueller wrote that the company engineers could not work out transmission issues, and the setup required power-assisted steering, which would have marked up the cost to over $3,200; the Kaiser was intended, though, to sell for less than the Frazer, which was coming out at around $2,000. The Kaiser K85, with its advanced unit-body construction, would never be built, and all Kaiser cars would have body and frame construction.