Having cut my teeth at the wheel of a 1957 VW Beetle, and having tempered my enthusiasm to unleash its full 30 bhp lest I ‘loose it’, I’ve always been a fan of air cooled power plants, especially if they hang out at the extreme rear end of the vehicle.
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As a consequence, I soon discovered first hand the meaning of oversteer, and survived to tell the tale!
So no surprise that a car I lustred for was Dr. Porsche’s 356 soon replaced by the first of the now iconic 911’s. So no surprise that on an extended tour of the USA in the mid ’60s, I encountered first hand General Motors ground breaking Corvair, and it was love at first sight!
In the early 1950s, the General along with Ford and Chrysler, were locked in step with their traditional largish bodied sedans powered by lazy lumps of iron in both 6’s and V8’s format, and driving through pretty basic but tough three speeders.
General Motors in particular had noticed a new kid on the block Volkswagon, were starting to make minor inroads into their traditional markets.
But by 1958-1959, the pesky Vee Dubs were making serious inroads into their patch with sales now exceeding 100,000! Perhaps there was a market for an American “people’s car”?
Impressed by the simplicity and ruggedness of the little flat 4 there seemed little point in re-inventing the wheel, but true to the American ethos of big is better, General Motors opted for a flat 6 layout of some 2.3 litre capacity.
Bearing in mind this was several years before Porsche took their steadily improving 4’s up to the next level with their now iconic 6’s with the introduction of the 911.
Ironically, The General installed their new hush-hush new six cylinder baby in a Porsche 356 for on road testing. Surely gotta be the ultimate tribute to Ferry Porsche, who in a nice touch arranged to buy one of the first Corvairs off the production line.
Naturally enough with such a radical new design, secrecy was paramount and the project was coded “Holden 25”, with prototypes badged as Holdens, and sporting ‘insect screens’ in front of a non-existent ‘radiator’, although there were never plans to build the Corvair in Australia!
Early models had some unique teething problems and with a single fan belt looking after cooling and generator drive this was not too surprising.
The single belt twisted four times through 540 degrees instead of the normal 360 degrees, but Chevy engineers soon had it sorted.
But the Corvairs main undoing came in the form of a young 31-year-old lawyer, Ralph Nader, who in 1965 published his book ‘Unsafe at any Speed’, after a string of single-car serious accidents.
Numerous court cases ensued and the car was perceived to be ‘unsafe’ and in May 1969 after a production run of 1,710,018 units the Corvair was buried.
By then the car had undergone numerous improvements, and it was generally agreed that the tail heavy, oversteering ‘Chevy-VW’ got more than its share of bad press, and in 1972 a government backed committee, essentially discredited much of what Nader had written in the first chapter of his book.
For my part, having been weened on the VW platform with its swing axle rear suspension, I survived my youthful encounters at the wheel of several Corvairs, and it’s high on my wish list of cars I’d love to have today.
