Doors that disappear into the bodywork
01/01/2012
When the BMW Z1 was presented at the end of the 1980s, the world was amazed at the vertically retractable doors (picture below). However, a sports car with doors that disappeared into the body existed much earlier, in the 1950s to be precise.
The Kaiser-Darrin was designed by Kaiser designer Howard Darrin and was based on the chassis of the Kaiser-Frazer 'Henry J'. The small sports car, of which only 435 were built from the winter of 1953, was particularly eye-catching due to its nose design, which looked like a kissing mouth. Characteristic of the Kaiser-Darrin were the horizontally sliding doors that disappeared into the front fenders.
Incidentally, company boss Henry J. Kaiser was not really taken with the car, but his wife overruled him and series production could begin. After a year, however, it was over when Kaiser gave up passenger car production altogether.
In addition to the unusual doors, the Kaiser-Darrin also had the body material in common with the BMW Z1; both had a plastic body. Another parallel was the inconvenient entry: on the Kaiser-Darrin, the relatively short doors disappeared only partially into the front fenders, leaving only a narrow door opening; on the BMW Z1, the vertically retractable doors ensured that the bodywork was too high to climb over.
After the end of production at Kaiser, Howard Darrin continued to produce a further 50 cars in various designs under his own management until 1958. A Kaiser-Darrin from 1954 can be seen in the Louwman Museum in The Hague .
