The required tire pressures were unusual: 15 psi in front, 26 psi While Ralph Nader certainly made some valid points in his most popular book, the Corvair may not have been as bad as he claimed. In its maiden road test, Road & Track concluded the Corvair is a sane, sensible, well-designed car of a type weve been asking for for 10 years. Chevrolet sold 337,371 Corvairs in 1961. With one eye on a shrinking market share and the other eye firmly fixed on the bottom line, GM, Ford and Chrysler executives set about to develop cars intended to blunt this infestation. Still, Nader asserted that the Corvair stood out because its swing-axle suspension and rear-engined layout contributed to dangerous oversteer. There was a problem submitting your report. VW, Porsche and Renault used 15 tires on their rear-engine cars. Gas was cheap, and the majority of drivers neither knew nor cared about such a mundane issue as fuel economy. All rights reserved. It was designed to compete against the small cars that were taking a considerable amount of the American market near the end of the 1950s. In fact, driving through the mountains was a blast almost as much fun as driving them in a Corvette. Several examples are given of people being run over, or cars becoming runaways because drivers were not familiar with the shift pattern, causing them to shift into reverse when intending to shift to low gear, or vice versa. At that speed it was unbelievably smooth and was All rights reserved. sunlight. Far more fun to drive (and cheaper) than comparable muscle cars. By then, however, General Motors had killed the Corvair and Nader had prevailed in the court of public opinion. info@lighthouse-services.com, suspension system in the Chevrolet Corvair, 5 Ways to Alter a Negative Perception of Ethics and Compliance, How to Protect Whistleblowers Against Retaliation, How to Reduce the Risk of Unethical Behavior During Mergers and Acquisitions, The Role of the Board of Directors in Ethics and Compliance Program Oversight, Placing a Premium on Ethics How to Instill a Commitment to Compliance in Your Employees, The Importance of Developing an Ethics and Compliance Crisis Management Plan. Since I'd spent a lot of time in Volkswagen Beetles and early Porsches, which also had rear weight bias and swing-axles, I was programmed to keep my foot on the throttle, so I made it through the corner. These cars are so universal!!!!! Had one interesting moment that I remember. But even more flawed was the debate that surrounded it. Oct 25, 2019 at 9:38am, | autoevolution and the autoevolution logo are registered trademarks. The rules required a passenger observed the speedometer and that you stayed in your lane at all times. I pulled over, sweating, and sat beside the road for a while, taking in the smell of the grass, the cerulean blue of the summer sky, and the trill of robins flitting through the trees that I had nearly wrapped myself around. Jun 7, 2019 at 9:01am, | The whole issue was highly exaggerated and over-hyped, just like Naders book. Unlike many other vehicles, the Corvair utilized a swing-axle suspension system. Each of the book's chapters covers a different aspect of automotive safety: The subject for which the book is probably most widely known, the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair, is covered in Chapter 1"The Sporty CorvairThe One-Car Accident". In his book Unsafe at Any Speed, the famous and often outspoken political activist Ralph Nader claimed that the Chevrolet Corvair was the most dangerous automobile on the road in the 1960s. On the other hand, so would most any car. 10 Best Classic American Cars Ever - hotcars.com The swing axle rear suspension of the pre 1965 models received a lot of criticism but other cars including VWs, Porsches and Mercedes had this type of suspension. In addition, tens of thousands of product-related personal injury lawsuits are filed against manufacturers annually. This problem, according to Nader, was well known to persons in the industry, but little was done to correct it. I love that car. Subtitled "Damn the driver and spare the car," Chapter 7 discusses the way the blame for vehicular crashes and harm was placed on the driver. Low profile Firestone 13 radials on the front and even lower profile 14s on the back helped a lot. One night, on a deserted highway, I decided to see what it would do..I backed off the Chapter 2 also exposes workmanship problems and companies' failure to honor warranties. Ralph Nader is a dick BUT, he did us poor folk a favor LOL!!!!!!!!!!! It was offered for a while with a gasoline-burner heater located in the front "trunk," a common but dangerously dumb accessory at the time. A redesign for the 1965 model eliminated the tuck-under crash tendency. Automotive History: 1960-1963 Chevrolet Corvair Gun manufacturers are viewed by many as morally responsible when one party uses their product to harm another. According to an article I read somewhere they actually produced a flat 10cyl prototype for use in a front wheel drive configuration. Liking it indicated that you belonged to the "car guy" elite, a group that prided itself on driving skill, mechanical knowledge and self-sufficiency. In 1962, an even more robust Monza Spyder was introduced. Do some research on how the classic mustangs were basically rolling bombs with the top of the gas tank also being the very thin floor of the interior. The father and son were able to get out and were on the edge of the road when I stopped there. By then the Corvair had been out of production for two years and the affair was mostly over. GM finally did that in 1964 and switched to independent rear suspension in the 1965 second-generation Corvair. history lesson courtesy No more dangerous than any other car on the road at that time. I think my Corvair could take a corner appreciably faster than the typical front engined car of the day. The sporty Monza was an immediate hit with buyers and quickly became the bestselling Corvair in a rapidly expanding lineup that soon included a Monza convertible, Lakewood station wagon and Greenbriar van that could be equipped for commercial or passenger use. Evaluation of the 1960-1963 Corvair Handling and Stability. They will never cease the need to be monitored. The Chevrolet Corvair was an automotive litmus test. Corbin, a General Motors die-maker, has owned 34 Corvairs, three of them now in his garage. According to the National Business Ethics Survey, companies that are participating in an M&A or any other form of major restructuring experience a 21.5 percent increase in inappropriate conduct on average. Although it was rear engined rather than the more typical front engine located between the front wheels it may have a comparable number since the engine was rather light. I dont think I drove mine at much over 100mph. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is a non-fiction book by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, first published in 1965. I think I read somewhere that GM had designed 2cyl, 4cyl, 8cyl, 10cyl, and 12cyl variants of this engine. I used to race all over with this car and I mean race. After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. But I refused to believe that Nader could be right, so I suppressed my unease and accelerated hard into one of my favourite corners, a smooth right-hander. Chevrolet Corvair The existence of some of this information has been called to the Governments attention by Mr. Ralph Nader. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had conducted a series of comparative tests in 1971 studying the handling of the 1963 Corvair and four contemporary cars, a Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, Volkswagen Beetle, Renault Dauphinealong with a second generation Corvair with revised suspension design. At first, GM tried to fight back. I had a 1966 Corvair, automatic, and also worked for a store that had a Corvair Monza, as well as a Corvair vanboth 4 speed standard transmissions. Nader seemed to miss the point that the rear engine may have also been a contributing factor that lead to many accidents. This transition does not result in abnormal potential for loss of control. !,,, 2nd generation(65and up) is sexy looking. Apr 2, 2021 at 6:32pm, | Two of them had built cars, the other was just in the planning stage, Tthe sports ruling body drew up a new set of rules allowing substantial modifications to the standard vehicles, thus obviating the need to sell road-going race cars. He drove the car successfully at ever-faster speeds through a prescribed cone course. I thought my Corvair handled much better than most American cars of the period. [4] Despite proper tire pressures being more critical than for contemporaneous designs, Chevrolet salespeople and Corvair owners were not properly advised of the requirement and risk. My sense is that many people who dont know what they are talking about like to repeat such statements as unsafe at any speed in order to make themselves sound knowledgeable but, in my estimation it is BS. That book was a joke as was Nader!!! But there was more to it than that. It leaked oil like a derelict tanker. I think a 50/50 weight distribution or something approaching that condition provides better handling but the usual American cars of the day were highly biased front to rear, more so I think, than the Corvair was biased toward the rear. A farmer helped him right the car so he could continue driving, albeit without a windshield. The corvair was a car produced by General Motors, Chevrolet division, Just kidding. The engine was a mix of aluminum block and steel cylinders. WebCorvair engine with no top shroud: Note the finned cylinders and spark plugs. George Caramagna, a mechanic working on the suspension system, suggested installing a stabilizer (anti-roll or "anti-sway") bar, but was overruled by GM management. Up to that time, most US cars were larger than [11], In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. Steering columns were rigid, panels were not padded, and so on. Chevy Corvair Many people add the Corvair to this list because of its, NASA Working on System That Will Make Autonomous Aircraft Common in City Skies. Peter Cheney's memorable cars - the good and the bad Sep 8, 2019 at 6:52pm, | Nov 9, 2021 at 7:35pm, | Possibly the previous owner had made some modifications I was unaware of but I dont think so. Possibly if a car was not maintained properly, driven with deflated tires, they didnt know how to drive a rear engined car? I charged $1.00/week, for each person, could keep my car filled with gas, and still had enough money left over for lunch, every dayLOL!
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