While Volkswagen has done an admirable job of keeping W.O. Bentley’s name at the forefront of the ultra-luxe brand he founded, and the Charles Rolls/Henry Royce duo looms large in the minds of gearheads with sybaritic tendencies, your average layman gives not two whits about the men behind the names; the brand is all. So when South Korean automaker SsangYong needed a name for the next generation of their Chairman executive sedan, they went straight for pre-Weimar Germany and appropriated the name of the kaiser!
Regrettably, they did not name the new machine the Chairman Wilhelm II. Then again, given the man’s role in a conflagration that consumed Europe and the Middle East, perhaps that was a smart business decision. Instead, they simply called the thing the Chairman Kaiser, which to American ears, anyway, sounds like more of a tribute to American industrialist and health-insurance pioneer Henry J. Kaiser.
For a brief period, Kaiser’s name adorned a line of automobiles. Upon Kaiser Motors’ merger with Willys-Overland, the company quickly went in all in on the line of utes derived from the Willys Jeep, ultimately renaming the company Kaiser Jeep in 1963. The Kaiser Jeep brand lasted only until 1970, when AMC absorbed the four-wheelin’ marque.
The Kaiser will be a zootier version of this, the Ssangyong Chairman W.
But the SsangYong Kaiser apparently has nothing to do with Jeep at all, aside from the fact that the Grand Cherokee shares underpinnings with Mercedes utes and the Chairman Kaiser utilizes Benz powertrain components, including a 300-hp 5.0-liter V-8 as the top-line engine choice. Wards Auto quotes a SsangYong spokesman thusly: “In German it means emperor, higher than a king. And like the name ‘Chairman,’ it means dignity. It is a vehicle for people who care and have dignity. It’s a good name.”
Would it be churlish to point out that Wilhelm II, the last of the kaisers, died in exile, responsible for the destruction of a continent and the death of a generation of young men, having left the ground open for the rise of one of the most malevolent totalitarian regimes ever to know power? Yes? Okay then, SsangYong. Kaiser on.
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