The Chevy Corvair Could’ve Changed GM Forever, So Why Did It Fail?
Behind the wheel of one of the first Corvairs built, we uncover the truth behind Chevy’s most polarizing car.
[This story originally appeared in the September/October issue of MotorTrend Classic.]1959 was epochal for General Motors. Every GM car was new and full-size, except the Corvette, and division-creep had begun to blur class distinctions between divisions. The 1959 models were all built on the same architecture, with similar wheelbase lengths and distinctive sheetmetal and interior design, and with each division’s own engines. They were longer, lower, and wider than the 1958s, a reaction to Virgil Exner’s 1957 Chrysler Corporation cars.
But GM’s biggest news came on October 2, 1959, when its first compact, the Chevrolet Corvair, went on sale. It was 180 inches long and rode on a 108-inch wheelbase, compared with 119 inches for the Impala. Motor Trend had written about the compact revolution throughout the 1950s as American cars overgrew in size, and in late in 1955, fresh off the Chevy small-block V-8 launch, chief engineer Ed Cole established the small-car program. By 1959, Cole was general manager of the division.
The Corvair’s launch coincided with the introduction of the new Ford Falcon and Mercury Comet (originally designed to be an Edsel) and Chrysler’s Valiant (launched as a separate division, but made a Plymouth for 1961). The Falcon looked something like a shortened version of the next year’s Galaxie, and the Valiant was an upright and thoroughly conventional sedan.
The Corvair was revolutionary, even if many details could be found in Volkswagen’s early-1930s design. Fisher Body’s first unibody car had an air-cooled, 80-horsepower, 140-cubic-inch flat-six under the rear hood and out past the axle. It was an aluminum pushrod engine clustered with the transmission, a three-speed stick on the floor or optional Powerglide two-speed automatic operated by a dash-mounted lever to the right of the steering wheel. It had four-wheel independent suspension, using swing axles in the back, just like the Beetle and Mercedes-Benz 300SL. And it launched as a four-door sedan in two trim levels—500 and Deluxe 700—with a flat top and wraparound rear window, like the ones on GM’s four-door hardtops, and a rear-fender treatment with twin taillamps reminiscent of the Corvette’s. “Specifically designed the way a compact car should be,” Chevy advertised.
Motor Trend named it Car of the Year in its April 1960 issue. Though a derided choice now, the award went to the “most significant engineering advancement”—no contest. “We weren’t looking for the fastest, or the most economical, or the most lavish, or the best styled, but strictly ‘the most significant.’”
At $2038 for the base 500 four-door and $2103 for the 700 sedan, which added chrome exterior trim, passenger sunvisor, cigar lighter, and upgraded upholstery, the Corvair was costlier than a Falcon ($1974) or Valiant ($2033) sedan. A 1959 Beetle started at just $1565. In January 1960, Chevy added the Club Coupe and, late in the model year, the sporty Monza coupe with bucket seats stickered for $2238. Chevy sold 250,007 that first year, nearly 15,000 more than Valiant, but far short of Ford’s sales of 435,676 Falcons, which prompted a crash program in 1960 to build the 1962 Chevy II. This was the beginning of the Corvair’s demise.
Was the car as bad as that?
No. Our Cascade Green 1960 500 sedan was the 407th Corvair off the line, built July 10, 1959, at the Willow Run, Michigan, assembly plant. Options include passenger-side visor, armrests, AM radio, cigar lighter, backup lamps, and the Powerglide two-speed automatic, the transmission that far outsold three- and four-speed manuals, probably many to buyers who wanted a VW, but not with a stick shift. The car also has the optional gas heater in the trunk, with a line running to the same fuel pump that feeds the twin single-barrel carburetors. Bryce Flinn, son of the late owner, Jerald Flinn, says the heater provides instant warmth and cuts fuel economy from 24-26 mpg to about 20 mpg.
With that slushbox, the 80-horsepower car is slow off the line. But it builds speed adequately through midrange to catch up with modern traffic, and the two-speed shifts smoothly. The suspension is firm compared with those of bigger American cars of the era, with little floatiness.
You sit low on the original cloth bench seat, which is worn to a lumpy softness on the driver’s side. The Corvair feels smaller than it is, and it’s particularly narrow and low to the ground given its Saturn Ion-size overall length. You can reach the passenger-side window and vent wing easily from the driver’s seat.
The gearshift is tight and positive. Its unassisted drum brakes require anticipation, but they’re progressive and effective when you hit them hard enough. Steering is awful, with lots of off-center play and none of the feedback you’d expect of a nonassisted system. And the steering is slow, “so that when you did lose it, you had a hard time catching it up,” says writer and retired race/rally driver Denise McCluggage, whose 1963 article on how to drive a Corvair fast is quoted in “The Sporty Corvair” chapter of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.
As for the notorious rear-engine weight on a swing-axle rear suspension, there’s the slight feeling—a subtle shift felt in the seat of the pants—of positive camber in the left rear wheel while taking a right-hander on-ramp at moderate (for 1960) speed. Driving the car on a modern freeway, staring at the metal dash—with no seatbelts to be found—is daunting until you get used to it at 70 mph. The Corvair feels like a competent, if quirky American alternative to the odd little German, French, and English sedans invading mostly the East and West Coasts at the time. It’s delicate, as if it wasn’t made to last, but to be traded in after three years. And while it’s much more fun to drive than a conventional 1960 American sedan, you need a Monza with the optional four-speed manual to make this into anything like a sports car.
So the early Corvair had some appeal as a cutting-edge small car. Like the Beetle, Civic CVCC, or current Mini Cooper, it attracted avant-garde buyers, such as 1950s television pioneer/comedian Ernie Kovacs, who owned a white Lakewood station wagon. Ralph Nader’s book mentions Kovacs’s accident only in passing in “Unsafe.” He quotes Road Test magazine that early Corvairs “have been involved in one-car accidents such as [the one] in which Kovacs lost his life.”
Chevy built 32,120 rear-engine Lakewood wagons over two model years, 1961 and 1962.
Kovacs, known to be partial to martinis, was returning from a party at Milton Berle’s Beverly Hills home early on the morning of January 12, 1962, when he tried to make a left turn from Beverly Glen onto Santa Monica Boulevard at 50 mph. He lost control on the rain-soaked street and smashed into a utility pole.
“Nader approached Adams,” says Corvair historian Dave Newell, but she declined to file suit. However, “the Corvair litigation machine had already begun.” For 1965, the all-new Corvair had a fully independent control-arm suspension, based on the Corvette’s. The body is 3.3 inches longer, 2.8 inches wider on the same 108-inch wheelbase length as the old car, and it’s 0.1 inch lower, at 51.2 inches tall. An optional telescopic steering wheel was adjusted by unscrewing its center cog. The Corvairs looked sportier and more upscale, with two- and four-door hardtops replacing sedans.
It feels safer and much more substantial. There’s more vinyl padding in Ken Hand’s Crocus Yellow 1965 Monza coupe, with a standard padded dash and front seatbelts. Its 110-horsepower, 164 cubic-inch flat-six (the top-line Corsa was available with a 180-horsepower turbo engine) launches the car well. Steering is still nonassisted, but it has much better feel and feedback than the 1960, and the turning radius is tighter, but with substantial on-center play. Handling is solid. It feels stiff, the match for any other four-seater of the period. The flat vinyl bucket seats give up grip long before the tires do (Hand’s car has period-correct aftermarket wheels in the factory 13x5.5-inch size).
The new Corvair could’ve been a contender. With its clean, Coke-bottle shape and Corvette-inspired front fenderline, it’s one of the best-looking Detroit offerings of the mid-1960s. But it lacks the long-hood/short-deck look of contemporaries from Ferrari to the Mustang. So why did GM kill the Corvair in 1969? As GM’s first compact, it proved you can’t make money building small cars, especially those with an unusual layout and engine, if you’re an American automaker.
Denise McCluggage writes that the Corvair experience stifled innovation at GM, but the 1971 Vega was another breakthrough (and another no-profit small car). The Corvair’s most important legacy might be GM’s aversion to oversteer. While its low-volume, high-performance Corvette Z06 will steer with the rear wheels, the new Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky’s rear tires are planted to the ground. “We can tune the Solstice’s suspension any way we want,” one GM insider says. And thanks to Nader and the Corvair, the lawyers at GM clearly want understeer.
So how good or bad was the Corvair? “Unsafe At Any Speed” galvanized its reputation as another loser of an American car, mentioned in the same breath as Chrysler Airflow, Edsel, Vega, Pinto, and AMC Pacer. But the 1960 to 1964 model deserves praise for its innovation, which GM executed as well as (not better than) competing European small cars of the time. Chevrolet had even begun experiments with a rear-mounted air-cooled V-8 for the future Impala/Belair/Biscayne line. The 1965 through 1969 Corvair, a better-looking, sportier, upscale model, was a credible competitor for European sport coupes and sedans, with a Corvette-derived suspension replacing the rear swing axle. Both Corvairs were good alternatives to status-quo American cars.
Nader also wrote and published Small on Safety: The Designed-In Dangers of the Volkswagen, in 1972, but the VW Bug had such a following that the book went nowhere and was quickly forgotten, Dave Newell says. If anything, public reaction was more anti-Nader than anti-Beetle. But the Corvair’s fate was sealed by publication of “Unsafe,” with sales struggling to reach half those of the Ford Falcon. The Mark II Corvair fared even worse against the new Ford Mustang. Chevy failed to convince buyers that American sporty cars didn’t need front-mounted V-8 engines.
Chevrolet’s Corvair would’ve become GM’s most important car ever. It was too far ahead of its time, and it convinced too few loyal import owners to buy American.
OUR TAKE
- THEN: “The choice of the 1960 Chevrolet Corvair was unanimous. Why? For engineering advancement: its air-cooled engine, transaxle and four-wheel independent suspension. All these combined spell progress and compel us to select the Corvair as the most significant car of 1960.” (Motor Trend, “Car of the Year,” April 1960.)
- NOW: This postmodern icon launched Ralph Nader’s career, even though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration exonerated the Corvair in the 1970s. Losing its market to the Mustang in 1964-1965 marked the failure of GM’s attempt to sell a “European-style” sporty car to the American public and thus set American car design back a decade. It’s more responsible than any other single car for the way General Motors does business.
