Willys Aero

The Willys Aero was a line of compact passenger cars built first by Willys-Overland and from 1953 by the Kaiser-Willys Corporation at Toledo, Ohio, from 1952 through 1955, with 91,377 cars made there. It was Willys first new car since the war, designed under the engineer Clyde Paton with a unitized body and a good power to weight ratio, and it was sold under model names that changed from year to year, among them Lark, Wing, Falcon, Ace and Eagle, plus the 1955 Custom and the Bermuda hardtop. Engines were the F-head Hurricane and flathead Lightning sixes, with a four-cylinder offered for export. Henry J. Kaiser dropped the car in 1955 to concentrate on Jeeps, but the tooling went to Brazil, where the Aero and its Itamaraty and Executivo derivatives were built from 1960 to 1971.