Kaiser Motors launched its attack on the Motor City battling on two fronts: with the medium-priced Kaiser and the Frazer premium brand.

Shipbuilding tycoon Henry J. Kaiser was a proud and willful man by all accounts, but he was shrewd enough to know what he didn’t know. And when he audaciously launched his own car company in August of 1945 to compete head on against the Motor City giants, he knew he didn’t know anything about the auto industry.

So he appointed as his president Joseph W. Frazer, an experienced Detroit automobile man who helped Walter P. Chrysler launch the Chrysler and Plymouth brands. Meanwhile, Graham-Paige Motors, which Frazer and his associates then controlled, took a sizable minority ownership position in Kaiser Motors, and plans were ultimately laid to introduce two new car brands in the autumn of 1946: the Kaiser and the Frazer, with the Frazer to serve as the new automaker’s premium product.

Originally, the Kaiser was to be a radical front-drive design (see our feature on the fwd Kaiser here) while the Frazer was to be a conventional American rear-drive sedan. But there wasn’t enough time or money to properly develop the front-drive project, so when the Kaiser and Frazer appeared in the showrooms, they were remarkably similar cars.

Kaiser and Frazer shared the same basic body shell (strikingly modern, if a little plain) and totally conventional ladder-frame chassis on a 123.5-in wheelbase. And they were both powered by the same Continental L-head six that offered a modest 100 hp from 226 CID, later bumped to 112 and 115 hp. Externally, it could be a little difficult for casual observers to tell the Kaiser and Frazer apart from some angles. One small but helpful differentiator is the hood emblem. On the Frazer it’s a heraldic crest, while the Kaiser’s badge is simply a K.

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Along with its Kaiser stablemate, Frazer offered novel body styles on the basic four-door platform, including a four-door convertible (bottom photo) that was alone in the industry at the time, and the Vagabond, a sedan/wagon hybrid that could be called a forerunner of the modern hatchback. (Kaiser’s version was called the Traveller. Reportedly, the company couldn’t spare the funds to tool up a proper wagon.) One area where the Frazer Manhattan deluxe model stood apart was in its interior appointments, with rich leaher and snazzy fabric combinations crafted by Carleton Spencer, Kaiser’s style man and a true innovator in car interior design.

Frazer and Kaiser fell out in the spring of 1949, as the two men had incompatible ideas about the company’s direction. Among other things, Frazer thought Kaiser’s production targets were unrealistic and dangerous, especially for a new and continually underfunded carmaker. Frazer could foresee thousands of excess cars sitting unsold on dealer lots, and his fears were proven correct.

Upon his departure as president, Frazer took a ceremonial position at Kaiser Motors and his namesake brand lived on, though sales were disappointing.The company couldn’t hope to match Detroit’s far greater economies of scale, driving the brand’s prices slightly above Buick and Packard—a hopeless market position. In five model years, total Frazer production amounted to not quite 156,000 cars, not bad for a startup but a pittance by Motor City standards.

Kaiser received an all-new body with a shorter 118.5-in wheelbase for 1951, but the lame-duck Frazer soldiered on for one more year with a freshened-up version of the old body shell (lead photo) before it was discontinued. Frazer, who got his start in the auto industry as a mechanic’s helper and was elected to the Automobile Hall of Fame in 2012, died in 1971.