For 1955, Willys Motors ditched the Aero name and rebranded its compact two-door hardtop as the Bermuda.
Shown above at the Chicago Auto Show in all its glory is the Willys hardtop for 1955. It might look like the familiar Aero, the same car produced by WIllys from 1952 through 1954, but the company decided that a new name and a new image were in order. For ’55, the two-door hardtop was rebranded as the Bermuda.
How the name change came about is unclear, but it is known that Henry J. Kaiser and Edgar Kaiser of Kaiser Motors, which acquired WIllys-Overland in 1953, had a fondness for tropical names and themes. Meanwhile, the new combination of Kaiser Motors and Willys-Overland, created in a deal worth around $60 million, was given the name Willys Motors, Inc.
In its transformation into the Bermuda, the Aero was given a more elaborate Kaiser-ish grille up front, revised bright-metal side trim with a zigzag theme, and big chrome tail lamp housings out back with backup-lamp nacelles styled to look like jet exhausts. But minus the new exterior jewelry the Bermuda was an Aero, with the same unit-construction body shell and platform engineered by Clyde Paton and manufactured by Murray of Detroit. (See our feature on the Aero here.)
There was a significant change under the hood, however. The 161 cubic-inch 90 hp Willys F-head six was replaced by the Kaiser 226 cubic-inch L-head six with 115 hp as the standard powerplant. (A handful of Bermudas were produced with the F-head, possibly for export.) A three-on-the-tree manual gearbox was standard, while extra-cost options included a three-speed plus overdrive ($85) and the General Motors Hydra-Matic ($179). While the bigger Kaiser six offered consideraly more torque, some Willys fans say the handling suffered due to the Super Hurricane’s additional weight up front..
Very soon into the 1955 production run, the Ace sedan was rebadged as the Willys Custom (above). The Custom featured all the same exterior changes and mechanical features as the Bermuda, but in a four-door post body style. Here, too, the old Aero Willys name all but vanished from the company’s promotional materials.
Along with the name changes for ’55, Willys slashed prices by hundreds of dollars in an effort to boost sales, with the Bermuda listed at $1,895, then $1,795, and advertised as the lowest-priced hardtop in America (below).But the Aero had never been a strong seller from the start, and the new badging and price cuts didn’t accomplish a thing.
From not quite 12,000 cars in ’54, sales tumbled to fewer than 6,000 in ’55, with only 2,215 Bermudas finding buyers. Willys Motors left the passenger car business for good at the end of the model year to concentrate on its more profitable Jeep-based models. But in 1960, the Aero would begin a second life—and a far longer and more successful one—in Brazil.
In the car biz, it’s very hard to slow or stop a sales slide. The steeper it gets, the more the dealers are frantic and the customers worried about service, parts, warranties, and resale value. All of which translate to Don’t Buy That. Interesting that the Jeep brand wasn’t affected.
Quite so. Richard Langworth told the story of trying to talk his father into buying a Willys Bermuda. His father said no, the car would be an orphan in a year with zero resale value. That’s what the independent automakers were up against.
The only Willys I was ever in was a classmate who brought his dad’s 1954 (?) Aero 2dr post to our corner store hang out on Saturday night. Boy, talk about small, inexpensive wheels – but solid as a rock. Six or seven of us would squeeze in, light up smokes and puff away until nobody could breath any more. Then we would pile out and watch the smoke billow out into the sky. Are teens still that stupid.
No, teens are much smarter now. They’ve traded away cigarettes for vaping.