Patrick Foster’s idea of a Hudson-Willys merger still raises major questions

(EXPANDED FROM 10/17/2023)

A few years ago Patrick Foster (2023) suggested in a Hemmings column why a marriage of Hudson and Willys could have made sense. More recently he updated his essay, so I was curious to see if he had addressed any of the questions that lingered from his original article.

The short answer: Nope. Foster’s take still sounds more like barstool philosophizing than serious historical analysis. That he didn’t appreciably beef up his analysis illustrates a key weakness of the American automotive history. The field evolves at glacial speed in no small part because individual historians tend to operate inside their own little bubbles.

So at the risk of sounding impertinent, let’s walk through the questions I still have about Foster’s take.

Was there enough cost savings to justify a merger?

Foster (2023/2024) suggested that the two companies could have saved money by pruning the ranks of management and consolidating various departments such as for accounting and sales. That’s true, but he didn’t discuss integrating production in one plant. This was one of the bigger steps a new combine could take to increase economies of scale (Edwards, 1965).

If plant consolidation had occurred, I assume that it would have been in Hudson’s Detroit, Michigan facility. That assembly plant presumably had higher production capacity as well as more complete and modern equipment than Willys’ Toledo, Ohio facility.

As a case in point, in 1949 Hudson production peaked at almost 160,000 units in 1949. Foster (2014) reported in a Jeep book that the truck-maker’s production capacity had been increased to 150,000 units in 1947. However, in the early-postwar years Willys didn’t get close to using that capacity. In addition, Jeep bodies were much simpler to produce than the Hudson step-down models. Could the Willys factory have been refitted to produce Hudsons without costly upgrades?

Most notably, could Hudsons and Jeeps have been built in the same plant without significant reconfigurations because Hudsons had unit-body construction whereas Jeeps used separate body-on-frame construction?

Mixing construction methods didn’t usually occur

The historical literature tends to suggest that the two types of car construction required different assembly plant layouts.

For example, the Ford Motor Company felt the need to build a brand-new plant to produce its new unit-body Thunderbird and Lincoln/Continental for 1958 (go here for further discussion).

That said, Willys-Overland Motors managed to assemble Jeeps along with the unit-body Aero at its Toledo, Ohio plant. In addition, in 1979 American Motors assembled larger Jeeps at its Kenosha, Wisconsin plant even though it had previously only built unit-body passenger cars (Foster, 2023/2024).

In the comments below, S. Bauer offered evidence that one could potentially mix construction methods. However, it would depend on the specifics of how the two types of vehicles were produced. Might Foster have assumed that it wasn’t possible? If so, he didn’t say.

Other automakers may have been a better match up

If Hudson’s Detroit plant could not have easily added Jeep production, that would have been a big downside of hooking up with Willys. Hudson management may have ideally wanted to keep keep open its facility after a merger. That didn’t happen once the automaker was absorbed by Nash.

If Hudson couldn’t integrate Willys production in its plant, Nash also might not have been able to either because its plants produced only unit-body cars. That would have left Studebaker, Packard and Kaiser as the most promising merger partners because they used body-on-frame construction.

Also see ‘Hudson would have been the best option for a Packard tie up’

One wild card was whether Willys management prioritized a merger partner that kept the Toledo factory open. If this had been the case, then a merger with Kaiser arguably made the most sense because that automaker clearly needed to offload its massive Willow Run, Michigan plant in favor of a smaller one more appropriate to its declining production levels (Langworth, 1975).

Meanwhile, it’s hard to see how Studebaker could have justified keeping Toledo open since it had a truck plant in South Bend, Indiana (Langworth, 1979, 1993). Packard might have initially kept Willys production in Toledo but moved it to the automaker’s Detroit plant as passenger-car volume declined.

Why would both Willys and Hudson offer compacts?

Foster appeared to assume that Hudson would offer a version of the compact Willys Aero. That may be because his article was initiated by a reader sending him drawings of an Aero-based Hudson Jet. So perhaps he was just being nice.

However, that begs the obvious question: What was the value of fielding two competing products if a goal was to integrate dealer networks? And why would a merger be useful to Hudson if dealer networks were not integrated?

That brings up another question. Foster (2023/2024) stated that “both brands would have increased their networks by a good amount, likely spurring a significant increase in sales volume.” I can see why that might have helped Willys, but why Hudson? Willys dealers had been primarily focused on selling trucks so may not have been well suited to selling premium-priced passenger cars.

In addition, at least some dealers would likely have had overlapping sales territories. This happened in the wake of the Hudson’s merger with Nash to form American Motors (Edwards, 1965). The main advantage Hudson dealers would have gained from a merger may have been to broaden their product line. The Jeeps might not have been huge sellers at the retail level, but they also did not face the brutal competition that full-sized Hudsons and compact Aeros did as the 1950s progressed.

Why would Willys field a Hudson-based big car?

Foster’s (2023/2024) least-compelling idea was that “Willys could have fielded a version of the Hudson Wasp as a full-size Willys car.” He noted that this was “admittedly unlikely,” but I would put it in the category of “no way.” What could possibly have been gained by such a move — particularly if dealer networks had been integrated?

To be fair, Foster was right that Willys saved Kaiser as well as American Motors and arguably even Chrysler and Fiat. This strikes me as hugely ironic given that Willys was arguably the weakest of the early-50s independents. Perhaps even more amusingly, the Jeep lineup was the antithesis of Detroit’s postwar emphasis on glitzy and powerful mansions of glory.

All that said, I don’t think a Hudson-Willys marriage would have made the most sense of the various options unless all car and truck production could have been consolidated in the Detroit plant. That’s why the key question was whether this was possible without prohibitively costly changes. It’s too bad that Foster didn’t address this rather than waxing philosophical about such things as a Wasp-based Willys. It’s fun barstool talk, but not much more.

NOTES:

This story was originally posted on Oct. 17, 2023 and expanded on Jan. 23, 2026. Production figures from auto editors of Consumer Guide (1993, 2006) and Foster (2014).

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RE:SOURCES

• Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 1993, 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
• Edwards, Charles E.; 1956. Dynamics of the United States Automobile Industry. University of South Carolina Press.
• Foster, Patrick;  2013. American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker. MBI Publishing Co., Minneapolis, MN.
• ——–; 2014. Jeep: The History of America’s Greatest Vehicle. Motorbooks, Minneapolis, MN.
• ——; 2023/2024. “What Would A Theoretical Hudson-Willys Merger Have Looked Like?” Hemmings. Posted Oct. 8; updated March 22.
• Langworth, Richard M.; 1975. Kaiser-Frazer: The Last Onslaught on Detroit. Princeton Publishing, Princeton, NJ. 
• ——; 1979, 1993. Studebaker 1946-1966: The Classic Postwar Years. Motorbooks International, Osceola, WI.

ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:

• oldcaradvertising.com: Willys (1947)
• oldcarbrochures.org: Hudson (1949, 1953); Willys Aero (1953)