It seemed like a good idea at the time
Fifty years ago this month, Motor Trend anointed the brand-spanking-new 1960 Chevrolet Corvair as its Car of the Year, and who could blame them? It was a major departure from the longer-lower-wider paradigm that had dominated Detroit for over a decade, and it was packed with all sorts of gee-whiz stuff that appealed to the gearheads in the automotive press. The engine was a rear-mounted, air-cooled flat six — four years before Porsche got around to stuffing such an engine into the first 911 — and the suspension was independent at all four wheels, wishbones up front and swing axles at the back. This latter was the problem: swing axles are prone to substantial camber change, which can provoke oversteer, letting the rear end slide out during a turn, and it didn’t help that the Corvair had 62 percent of its weight over the rear wheels. Mercedes-Benz had addressed this issue by dropping the pivot point below the differential, which is easier to do when you have room for it, which the Corvair didn’t. Worse, to save a few bucks, GM decided not to include a sway bar, although suspension upgrades were made available at option starting in the 1962 model year, and to counteract oversteer, the General prescribed weird tire pressures: 15 psi front, 26 rear. Which was fine if your pump jockey knew this, but every other car he was likely to see took the same tire pressures front and rear, and he might well have taken it upon himself to pump up those flat-looking fronts while you and the kids went off to the rest room.
The rest, as they say, is history: Ralph Nader attacked the car in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed; GM tried to harass Nader into silence. It didn’t work, and eventually GM chair John Roche apologized to Nader in front of a Senate subcommittee. Ironically, by 1965 GM had already phased in a brand-new rear-suspension design that didn’t have any of these problems. But by then folks who wanted small Chevrolets were flocking to the ordinary-as-dirt Chevy II, which in Nova trim was way more profitable than the Corvair. Legend has it that GM kept the car going through 1969, despite anemic sales, mostly to spite Nader.
That said, I was always fond of the Corvair, and its price ($2377 in 1960, a shade over $17,000 today, no thanks to inflation) didn’t seem too far out of line. It was not really speedy — with the optional two-speed Powerglide, reported MT, zero to sixty was a stately procession of 21.2 seconds — but this was not really any slower than my six-cylinder ’66 Chevy II with half again the displacement. And if the first Corvairs were sorta cute, the last ones bordered on gorgeous.
After that debacle, GM took everything it had learned about small cars, then promptly forgot it and built the Vega. Eventually the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration more or less exonerated the Corvair, not that it mattered anymore. And Ralph Nader, last I heard, is still around.
Francis W. Porretto »
7 December 2009 · 4:01 pm
After the federal government ruled that the Corvair is not an unsafe car, due to Department of Transportation testimony to that effect, Ralph Nader, a.k.a. The Man Who Cannot Be Wrong, shut up about it.
Nader was never interested in admitting to error. Nor would he concede that other people should be allowed their own priorities, if they differ from his. His giant ego and matching sanctimony got him a reputation as one of the biggest bullies in public life in his day.
Scooby214 »
7 December 2009 · 5:10 pm
I agree about the beauty of the late model Corvairs. They have always been one of my favorite cars. It was the complete opposite of my old ’64 Impala, so my dad wouldn’t let me get one when they were cheap. I certainly can’t afford one now.
McGehee »
7 December 2009 · 5:18 pm
I’ll have you know the Vega was not a “shitty little car,” it was a shitty car that happened to be little. Surely you don’t believe it would have been less shitty if it had been bigger, do you?
CGHill »
7 December 2009 · 6:09 pm
Nader, in the chapters that weren’t related to the Corvair, came up with an occasional valid insight, though this may be stopped-clock twice-a-day syndrome: shiny dashboards in those days did cause a hell of a lot of glare, and I’d hit a few protruding knobs when I was a tadpole. Still, he stuck all the Corvair stuff in Chapter 1, and reviewers back then were no more willing to read an entire book than reviewers are today.
Kay Dennison »
7 December 2009 · 9:30 pm
My first car was a Chevy II — what a piece of crap
unimpressed »
8 December 2009 · 3:19 am
I still want a Vega….but I wanna stuff a 350 in it.
John Salmon »
8 December 2009 · 8:51 am
Peter Egan couldn’t have done it better. Nice post, CGH.
ms7168 »
8 December 2009 · 9:22 am
My Dad was always a sucker for a neat car. Ran out and bought a brand new 1960 Corvair. We drove it everywhere with seemingly no real difficulty until the following year when he and I took a trip together and on the way home around a winding highway on a mountain it spun out of control and turned over. The very thing that Nader was complaining about. We weren’t hurt fortunately and to show you how things have changed they -fixed- the car instead of totalling it. It never was the same though so in 1962 he bought a brand new Chevy II Nova :) Ours was great. We just outgrew it since we were a family of six so it was traded for something larger in 1966.