Not so long ago…

Relaxing in the afternoon sun, this Corvair is a regularly used car and it has the patina to prove it. I warmed up this photo a bit to make it look like the sixties cars in my memory from the eighties, when a large number of these kinds of cars were still in circulation as basic transportation.

For those unfamiliar with it, the Chevrolet Corvair was conceived by General Motors as a response to the increasing popularity of cars like the VW Beetle, Renault Dauphine, and Hillman Minx in America. A smaller, lighter car, it had a rear-mounted flat six, just like a Porsche 911. GM’s bold experiment, led by engineer Ed Cole, who was General Manager of Chevrolet at the time and would go on to be GM’s President, failed – but not for the reasons most people think. And said failure had a profound impact on GM’s willingness to take risks with car designs thereafter.

The Corvair was later maligned by Ralph Nader as being “Unsafe at any speed” in his book of the same name. In truth, the Corvair handled pretty well for a rear-engined car (rear-engined cars were not uncommon in the 1960s). Nader’s book did expose some glaring issues with automotive safety, but the main claim of the book – that the Corvair was a death-trap, really wasn’t true.

Instead, the Corvair failed because it was just too strange for most American car buyers, who flocked to the rival Ford Falcon, a much more conventional car. The Falcon was basically a scaled-down traditional Ford, front-engine, straight-six, rear drive – and the Corvair was something totally different from any American car that had come before it other than the Tucker. It’s unconventionality did not serve it well – it was too big to appeal to the same folks who wanted VW or a Renault, and too unusual to appeal to many buyers who wanted something smaller than a traditional Detroit car but had a more conventional car in mind. Furthermore, being rear-engined, it was unable to grow past its design origins, as other American “compacts” did in the 1960s, evolving quickly into popular mid-size cars that could be had with larger and larger engines (giving birth to the 1960’s Muscle cars). The Corvair could not accommodate larger engines, and after Nader’s book, also bore some public taint from Nader’s accusations.

Chevrolet would never again take such a big risk on a popular car – the reaction to the Corvair made the corporation much more risk-averse when trying new engineering ideas, particularly in an era when the traditional solutions (bigger engines, conventional cars) worked just fine.