Hennesey Automotive Group - Sarasota, FL

Classic & Collector Car Consignment

1949 Kaiser

Virginian Special

Continental Inline-6 - 59,595 Original Miles - All Original - Former Club President's Car

The Story

There is a kind of American that builds something instead of buying it - who believes, down in the marrow, that a nation capable of putting a B-24 Liberator into the sky every sixty-three minutes can damn well build a car worth driving. Henry Kaiser was that kind of American. And this car, this particular car, is what he left behind.

She was born at Willow Run, Michigan - the same cathedral of corrugated steel where Ford's workers once rolled bombers off the line at the rate of one per hour. The war was over. The boys were home. And Kaiser, never a man to let a good factory go quiet, leaned into the future with everything he had.

This 1949 Kaiser Virginian Special - serial K-492-019580 - was the 18,580th built of her series. One of the very last 1949 Specials to roll out before the line turned toward 1950. She was somebody's new car once, in the way that only first cars and last cars ever truly are.

She eventually found her way into the hands of the president of the Kaiser-Frazer Owners Club - a man who devoted a significant portion of his life to the preservation and celebration of exactly this kind of machine. He knew what he had. He knew why it mattered. And the car shows it.

The Car

Every square inch of her - the aged blue paint that carries its years the way good leather carries its miles, the checkered Carleton Spencer interior still wearing its original diamond-pattern cloth, the ivory steering wheel with the chrome "K" sitting proud at center - speaks to a life of careful, knowledgeable stewardship.

We believe her to be all original. That is not a phrase we use carelessly.

The Continental "Supersonic" inline-6 turns over with the easy confidence of an engine that has never been pushed past what it was built to do. She has been freshly serviced - she runs and drives fantastically, the kind of road manners that remind you these weren't primitive machines. They were simply honest ones. The odometer reads 59,595 miles. We have no reason to doubt it. The interior alone tells you that story - the wear is exactly where wear should be, and nowhere it shouldn't.

Climb inside. Sit in that rear bench - wide and flat-floored, the way Kaiser intended, like a proper American living room moving at sixty miles an hour. Look out through that wraparound glass at a world that still believed, in 1949, that the future was something you could drive toward. Kaiser-Frazer was gone by 1955. But this car did not go quietly with them.

Inquire About This Vehicle

Serious inquiries welcome. Shipping quotes available at no charge.

Sarasota, Florida - [email protected] - (941) 587-2081

Hennesey Automotive Group

Classic & Collector Car Consignment - Sarasota, Florida