Frigidaire was always subsidized by the GM automobile line. That is why they could try out so many ideas, constantly tinker with the inner workings of things so that one year of a Custom Imperial dryer could have 3 different moisture sensing auto dry systems, and afford such radical restyling of the line each year (at least at first). When the two oil crises in the 70s threw the US auto market such a loop that people actually started taking small cars seriously, GM, like the rest of the Big Three had learned nothing from the first oil shock and had little to offer the car buyers of the time. When GM started hurting, they started looking for ways to stop losing money and saw the Frigidaire appliance line. American Motors had done it a decade earlier and AVCO sold (out) Bendix a decade before that. The reason that the traditional Frigidaire washer disappeared with the sale was that GM did not sell that assembly line machinery.
Also lost in the sale were the big fat Radiantube heating elements that were long past due to go. They were originally invented so that the two heating elements that gave the five heats of the old click position switches (that preceeded infinite heat switches) would fit into a single surface unit that gave one even heating pattern on every setting. This was different than Hotpoint, GE, Westinghouse and all of the other range makers that used two separate coils in each surface unit that gave different heating patterns on different heats to greater or lesser degrees. By the late 50s, when infinite switches were more widespread and surface units did not need two different heating elements to provide different heats, Thermador and Philco, to name two brands, switched from the big fat tubes to the more modern and responsive thin elements similar in size to the Calrod's design.
Mistakes were made over the years. When the 1959 line of washers came out, the radical new design after the Unimatic had a motor that was too small and they began failing early on. Frigidaire had to replace every motor on those machines in the field with a larger motor. This was only one year after the WCI-58 had been ranked so highly by Consumer Reports. While it was a different mechanism underneath, the public did not know that. It looked like a Frigidaire when the lid was opened and people thought that they were buying a newer model of that great 1958 washer.
