Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars! This week’s question: What non-car company once sold a re-badged Kaiser? If you think you know the  answer, show your badge at the door and jump on through to see if you are correct. Badge engineering. That’s the name given to slapping some different nameplates on a product and passing it off as somebody else’s. It’s been a common practice in the auto industry for decades, and some efforts are so thinly veneered that it makes you wonder why anyone would even bother. I give you as evidence of the ‘they’re not even trying’ school of thought the Dodge Neon and its near identical twin the Plymouth… Neon. This wasn’t always the case, most brands had well developed personas and just slapping on a few badges couldn’t remove the eau de original so they put in a little more effort to differentiate between brands what was at heart the same car or truck. Of course, when you’re primary modus operandi isn’t making cars, what do you care what the brand character is? That was the case in the early fifties when Kaiser’s new economy car, the Henry J, was sold through the Sears catalog, not as a Kaiser, but under the Sears brand, Allstate. From How Stuff Works:

The 1952-1953 Allstate was an odd car that is remembered today (if it’s remembered at all) for being Sears, Roebuck & Company’s misguided attempt at entering the auto market. Sears usually goes to great lengths to hide the origin of proprietary products — those built by some other famous company but wearing a Sears brand. But there was no disguising the origins of the Allstate. It was, of course, the Sears version of Kaiser-Frazer’s compact Henry J. To create the 1952-1953 Allstate for Sears, designer Alex Tremulis was asked to contrive a hardware shuffle to give it a different look from the Kaizer-Frazer model that it was based on — the Henry J. This involved, as Tremulis recalled, mainly “a new face. I did a hurry-up remake of the grille, putting in two horizontals and a little triangular piece, made up a jet plane-type hood ornament that looked nice, and put on the Allstate logo with a map of the U.S. Voilá, there it was!” Other distinguishing exterior details were smooth hub caps or wheel covers without the “K,” special door locks, standard decklid (this was not standard on all Henry Js!). Under the hood the Willys-designed flathead engines were painted blue with orange “Allstate” lettering.

The Sears Allstate was not a successful car. People don’t generally buy cars sight unseen and Sears had issues with being able to deliver the cars nationally. There was also the problem of price. The four-cylinder Allstate retailed at a minimum of $1,395 when a Ford V8 or Chevy 6 could be had for only about $155- $200 more. The Allstate barely survived two model years before becoming a historical footnote. The Henry J suffered similarly despite Kaiser’s best efforts to spruce up the model with new grilles and a Continental kit for its final two model years. Regardless of the effort, Kaiser was forced to discontinue the poor-selling Henry J after the ’54 model year. Image How Stuff Works