Unusual American Project Car: A Rare Kaiser Darrin

This is a rare 1954 Kaiser Darrin that is currently being sold in largely complete but disassembled condition, with the body, chassis, and engine all having been restored/rebuilt awaiting reassembly.

The Kaiser Darrin is a largely forgotten American sports car first unveiled in 1952. It was one of the first production cars to use a fiberglass body, debuting before the C1 Corvette, and it featured a number of unique designs cues – like disappearing doors.

Fast Facts – The Kaiser Darrin

The Kaiser Darrin, designed by Howard “Dutch” Darrin, was one of the first American cars with a fiberglass body, debuting before the Corvette and featuring unique sliding doors. Only 435 were produced between 1952 and 1954.
The car was developed independently by Darrin using a Henry J chassis and was almost never produced – until Kaiser’s wife, Alyce, convinced her husband to approve it.
The Kaiser Darrin faced challenges due to its 90 bhp engine and high price, making it less competitive against faster rivals like the Jaguar XK120 and Chevrolet Corvette.
The featured car is a partially restored 1954 Kaiser Darrin, one of only two in the UK, currently for sale in disassembled condition after body, chassis, and engine restoration.

The Car That Almost Never Existed

The car that would become the Kaiser Darrin was developed not at a major US automaker, but by celebrated American designer Howard “Dutch” Darrin on his own dime, in his own design shop in Santa Monica, California.

Darrin had initially made a name for himself working in Paris, with fellow American designer Thomas L. Hibbard. The two men had founded coachbuilding firm Hibbard & Darrin in 1923 and enjoyed remarkable success, bodying chassis from many of Europe’s most high-end automakers.

The Great Depression hit the coachbuilding trade hard, as it did many others, and the end result was that Darrin moved back to the United States and would end up working for a new US automaker named Kaiser-Frazer.

Kaiser-Frazer And The Henry J

Kaiser-Frazer had been formed by automotive executive Joseph W. Frazer and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser to develop and build a series of new cars for the American public once WWII ended. Howard Darrin had been hired as a design consultant during this time, but his relationship had soured with the board after his more creative designs were always passed over or reinterpreted to be far more boring, in the hopes of appealing to the mass-market.

Darrin would resign in anger twice from Kaiser-Frazer and the company itself would undergo no small amount of turmoil, eventually becoming just Kaiser after Frazer departed and took his name with him.

The car that Kaiser had hoped would launch them into the forefront of the American automotive scene was the Henry J, developed to offer a cheap new car that would appeal to those who could only typically afford a secondhand vehicle.

The Henry J was a spartan car by any measure, offering only two doors, no trunk lid (it could only be accessed by lowering the rear seatback), no roll down rear windows, no glove compartment, and nothing at all in the way of luxury.

During the war and the years immediately afterward, when money was in short supply and everything was strictly rationed including gasoline, the Henry J was the perfect car. The problem was that by the time it was released in 1950, rationing was just about to end, and a cheap economical car with good mileage wasn’t that appealing to most American consumers.

A few thousand examples of the Henry J were sold between 1950 and 1954, with either a four or six cylinder engine, and a modest list of optional extras.

Howard Darrin And His Eponymous Creation

In the early 1950s, long before the Chevrolet Corvette or Ford Thunderbird had been designed and introduced, designer Howard Darrin predicted the exact market niche that they would eventually fill.

Darrin saw that many of the American GIs coming back from the war had fallen in love with British and European sports cars, and that the large American manufacturers had no models in the market to compete with them.

After getting his hands on a bare Henry J rolling chassis, Darrin had it shipped to his workshop, where he designed a sleek new body for it, before having it molded in fiberglass – still a wonder material at this time and essentially the 1950s equivalent to carbon fiber.

The car featured elegant styling, with an unusual shell-like front grille, and doors that rolled into the front wing rather than swinging open in the traditional way. Darrin developed the car in total secrecy before inviting Kaiser to see it in person, fortunately, Kaiser brought his wife with him.

Initially, Kaiser was furious, having already objected to wasting company funds to develop any kind of sports car. Darrin interrupted him to inform him that the car had been developed entirely out of his own pocket, and that if Kaiser didn’t put it into production, he would have the cars built and sold under his own name.

This is where Kaiser’s wife Alyce Chester stepped in. She admonished his temper and said something to the effect of: “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I don’t see why you aren’t in the business of building sports cars. I don’t think there will be many automobile companies that won’t go into the sports car business after seeing this car.”

This interjection from his wife completely changed Kaiser’s tune. A deal was struck to put the car into production and the vehicle would be branded the Kaiser Darrin in honor of its creator. Though the car would make its debut in 1952 at the Los Angeles Motorama, it wouldn’t go on sale until 1954 due to difficulties with productionizing the design.

The fact that the Kaiser Darrin had been based on the Henry J chassis and drivetrain would cause issues with its adoption, the 90 bhp 2.6 liter Hurricane Six engine (sourced from Willys-Overland) was deemed insufficiently powerful, and the handling left a lot to be desired.

Just 435 would be built in total, additionally hamstrung by the high asking price, and the inevitable comparisons with much faster machinery like the Jaguar XK120, Chevrolet Corvette, and Nash-Healey.

Surviving examples are enjoying a major renaissance today, thanks to increased interest in 1950s low-volume American sports cars.

The Kaiser Darrin Project Car Shown Here

The car you see here is one of those 435 original examples of the Kaiser Darrin that were sold new back in the mid-1950s. It’s now believed to be one of just two examples in the UK and as you can see in the images above and below, it’s part way through a stalled restoration.

The car reportedly has a restored fiberglass body, a restored chassis, and a rebuilt engine, with all this work having taken place in 2022. The listing notes that the car is largely complete, though as it usually the case with restorations, it’s likely that some pieces will need to be sourced to complete it.

The vehicle is now being offered for sale out of Wales in the United Kingdom on Car & Classic, it was previously registered in California, and it’s MOT exempt in the UK. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.

Images courtesy of Car & Classic

Ben Branch

Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.

Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.