Corvair - Fifty Years Old And Still Controversial... by VWLarry

5 minute read

By VWLarry

Before the year passes, it's not a bad idea to commemorate the "AARP birthday" of the arguably great and much lamented/lambasted Chevrolet Corvair; perhaps the most daring automobile for its own time ever introduced by ANY automobile manufacturer, on any continent. It's difficult to imagine a time when cars with rear-mounted, air-cooled boxer engines were considered virtually a "must" for any self-respecting carmaker to offer to the public, but the late 1950s were a time of upheaval and turmoil in the American automotive marketplace, and the Corvair arrived within that time as the (apparently) very logical and appropriate American answer to the "foreign invasion" of VWs, Renaults, Fiats, etc that were flooding the docks at American ports of entry. The steep increase in sales of these odd, quirky, tiny (and often tinny) European cars came as a startling shock to the suits in Detroit's boardrooms, who saw their share of the marketplace rise by multiple points every year, reaching the point where they overcame companies like the independents Studebaker and American Motors in sales. All the Big 3 makers embarked on new and costly programs to develop "answers" to the little foreign cars, but only GM decided to hit back with a head-on frontal assault, and the result was the darling of iconoclasts and automotive anti-establishment types everywhere, the Corvair. 

It took people, though...daring, innovative, free-thinking engineers and designers to come up with a new American car as completely devoid of traditional thinking (and Detroit was the HOME of traditional thinking then) as the new Corvair automobile. The "father" of the Corvair was perhaps one of the most fascinating and accomplished people ever involved in the car business, then, since only a guy like him could have had the guts, imagination, and actual political POWER within GM to pull the project into reality. He was Edward Cole, an engineer-turned-executive who had been promoting a new small/compact car to GM's board since the WWII years (the Chevrolet Cadet had actually reached production prototype status in 1946 before the GM Board killed it due to unprofitability projections), and who, in 1955, succeeded in getting funding for development of his new idea; that of a small-yet-roomy, rear-engined, aircooled model that could eventually be shared by several GM divisions, and not just Chevrolet, although by then, Cole was the chief executive at Chevy. Cole was very similar to other great automotive engineers such as Dr. Porsche, Ettore Bugatti, Enzo Ferrari, etc, in that he had an expansive imagination and very creative mind, and knew how to design machinery of excellence and innovation. His difference from them was that he was in the General Motors "system", with all the financial and marketing might that GM represented to the world at the time. Cole, btw, was also the "father" of the now legendary, and seemingly eternal, Chevrolet "small-block" V8 engine. He virtually designed the original 265 cubic-inch Chevy by himself, too, in a short amount of time, and the resulting engine turned out to be an instant masterpiece of high-revving, lightweight, compact powerplant design that has stood the test of decades, and millions and millions of copies. 

The new, prototype rear-engined Chevy was kept top-secret during its gestation, with only rumors surrounding it providing information to the outside world. Cole's brief for the car was: six-passenger capacity, all-independent suspension, rear-engine, with a relatively large-displacement, yet slow-revving opposed six-cylinder engine that featured direct air cooling, the last to compete with the then-ascendant Volkswagen Type 1 "beetle" that was becoming a smash-hit with Americans from coast-to-coast. The car was developed very carefully, with extensive testing on the proving grounds, etc, but it carried a fatal flaw that came to haunt the car later on, after the "new wore off". GM's relentless cost-accounting department severely restricted the funding to Cole for chassis-development, with the result that the production car had certain key compromises in it due to cost considerations, such as the heavier than intended engine (more cast iron was used instead of aluminum than had been planned), and perhaps most importantly, the swing-axle rear suspension (just like current VWs) was forced to forego a "camber compensating" transverse leaf-spring that was originally designed for it. The resulting "tail happy" oversteering dynamics of the car made them somewhat tricky for drivers to negotiate turns with, due to their tendency to snap-oversteer on closed throttle in turns. The engineers tried to compensate by specifying almost ridiculously low front tire pressures (12 psi on the fronts) in order to induce at least a little front-end understeer, but we all now know what happened when the Corvairs got into the public's hands, and specifically, into a certain, obscure attorney named Ralph Nader's hands. What had been a very popular, "semi-smash-hit" new car in 1960 de-evolved into "GM's shame" by the end of the decade, even though it underwent a VERY expensive and VERY successful, by anyone's measure, re-design in 1965. 

Anyway, happy birthday, Chevrolet Corvair. Today, decades later, happily, there seem to be only two groups of people when it comes to Corvairs...those who love them, and the rest who have never even heard of the things. TCL folks seem to fit the former rather than the latter, and that's a good thing.