Once upon a time, Chevrolet, Ford, and Plymouth were known collectively as "The Low-Priced Three." This did not, however, mean that their cars were particularly small. Moreover, they kept growing year by year. A 1939 Chevrolet sedan was 190.2 inches (4,831 mm) long on a 112.3-inch (2,851-mm) wheelbase, weighing a bit under 3,000 pounds (1,340 kg); by 1959, the last year there was only one "standard-size" Chevy, a Chevrolet Bel Air sedan had grown to 210.9 inches (5,357 mm) on a 119-inch (3,022-mm) wheelbase, and its weight had swelled by about half a ton.

Chevrolet chief engineer Ed Cole, who became the division's general manager in July 1956, knew even as the '58 and '59 cars were being designed that something had to give. Shortly after he became general manager, he launched the development of a new compact car. It would eventually be called Corvair, taking its name from a 1954 GM show car.

The Corvair was not Chevrolet's first stab at building a compact car. Around the end of World War Two, there had been plans for an inexpensive, lightweight model called the Chevrolet Cadet. Largely the brainchild of Earle S. MacPherson (who subsequently defected to the Ford Motor Company), the Cadet would have been a smallish four-door sedan on a 108-inch (2,743-mm) wheelbase, weighing about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) and powered by a 133 cu. in. (2.2 L) OHV six. It would have been compact, economical, and, most importantly, cheap, with a target price of $1,000.

For a variety of reasons, the Cadet was never built. The postwar economy was a seller's market, with buyers eager to pay full sticker price (and more) for any car they could get. Since the Cadet wouldn't have been significantly cheaper to build than a regular Chevy, it would not have been a profitable item, and by the end of the 1940s, there was little will within Chevrolet to produce it. As the 1950s dawned, the idea of a cheap, dowdy economy car seemed positively un-American.

The Corvair might have met the same fate as the Cadet, were it not for the "Eisenhower recession" that hit the U.S. in the middle of 1957. Like most recessions, it hit middle-class buyers particularly hard. Sales for most 1958 cars -- which were bigger and thirstier than ever -- dropped precariously. Buyers looking to economize suddenly turned to small, imported cars like the Volkswagen Beetle, discovering in the process that some of those cars were better built and more fun to drive than the big American iron. The import market, which had been negligible a few years earlier, suddenly grew to worrisome proportions. Worse, even though the domestic automakers' sales rebounded for 1959, the imports' share of the American doubled, as did the sales of American Motors, whose bread-and-butter product was the compact Rambler. In September 1957, GM's president, Harlow Curtice, gave the green light to Cole's compact Chevy.

The biggest threat among the small imports was the Volkswagen. Less than 15 years earlier, Ford Motor Company had looked at the fledgling Volkswagen operation in Wolfsburg and proclaimed it worthless. Now, the Beetle was selling 120,000 units a year in the U.S. It had a growing, well-organized sales and service operation, and its new ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, had just unveiled a brilliant new marketing campaign. Volkswagen seemed like the one to beat.

In its basic layout and concept, Chevy's new compact was essentially an American version of the Volkswagen. It was to have a rear engine and transaxle, allowing the powertrain to be installed as a single module, thereby freeing the front end and interior for passenger and cargo space. The engine would be a lightweight, air-cooled unit with horizontally opposed cylinders ("flat" engines cancel their own secondary shaking forces without the expense or extra mass of balance shafts or heavy counterweights). Its rear  suspension would be a simple swing-axle arrangement, substituting coil springs for the Volkswagen's transverse torsion bars.


The distinctive styling of the original Corvair was much imitated in Europe -- there are about a half dozen mid-sixties European cars that borrow noticeably from the styling of this car, and it also influenced the 1959 Studebaker Lark, released about a year before the Corvair's public debut.

The Corvair would be bigger than the Volkswagen, of course, more suited to American tastes. It ended up not far from the intended size of the Cadet: about 180 inches (4,572 mm) long on a 108-inch (2,743-mm) wheelbase. Thanks in part to monocoque construction -- GM's first North American unibody design -- it tipped the scales at only 2,450 pounds (1,111 kg). Since that was still more than 500 pounds (227 kg) heavier than a Beetle, its air-cooled engine would be a six, rather than a four.

(It must be noted that the Corvair's engine was not Chevy's first venture into air cooling. Back in the early 1920s, engineer Charles Kettering had developed a unique "copper-cooled" four, which was finally launched -- against the advice and better judgment of Alfred P. Sloan, then on GM's advisory committee -- in early 1923. The engine proved to be both difficult to assemble and disastrously unreliable, and fewer than 800 were built. Only about 100 were actually sold, all of them soon recalled. According to legend, many were actually dumped into Lake Erie, although one survives today in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.)

Since the Corvair's flat six shared so little with any existing GM engine, its development was protracted and fraught with problems. The engine made extensive use of aluminum, the machining of which was still something of a black art at that time. Every part of the design process, from the shape of its cooling fins to the selection of gasket materials able to withstand its operating temperatures, involved a great deal of trial and error.

The initial production engine displaced 140 cubic inches (2.3 liters), tiny by American standards. It had a single camshaft actuating the valves through pushrods and hydraulic lifters, with a single-throat carburetor for each cylinder head. Despite the extensive (and expensive) use of aluminum, the engine ended up weighing more than 360 pounds (165 kg), nearly 80 pounds (36 kg) over its target weight, although that was still not bad for its era. (To put that figure in perspective, a Chevrolet small-block V8 weighed about 535 pounds (242 kg), and Chevrolet's elderly Stovebolt Six weighed about 40 pounds  (18 kg) more than that.) The flat six was rated at 80 gross horsepower (60 kW) at 4,400 rpm, with a maximum of 120 lb-ft (162 N-m) of torque at 2,400 rpm. It was the only air-cooled, aluminum passenger car engine made in America at that time.

While the VW offered only a four-speed manual transmission, Chevrolet initially planned to offer only automatic. It would be more expensive, but Ed Cole felt it would seem like better value to the average buyer. For the sake of production economy, the Corvair's two-speed automatic transaxle shared many of its components with the Powerglide used in big Chevy models. A conventional three-speed manual was eventually adopted as the standard transmission, with the automatic becoming an extra-cost option.

The decision to offer a conventional manual transmission was one part of an intensive cost-cutting program late in the Corvair's development process. GM had learned that both Ford and Chrysler were gearing up to release their own small cars: the Ford Falcon and Chrysler's Valiant. Both of these compacts were about the same size as the Corvair, and were clearly aimed at the same market. This represented a problem, because the Corvair's sui generis engineering made it more expensive to manufacture than the comparatively conventional Falcon and Valiant. To keep the Corvair's' price competitive, Chevrolet was forced to cut corners, leading to some serious unintended consequences.


Dimensionally, the Corvair is a little bit bigger than a modern Civic or Mazda3, not quite as big as a current Camry. It's more than two feet (about 79 cm) shorter than a contemporary Chevy Impala.

All three new compacts went on sale as 1960 models. The Corvair bowed in October 1959, with a staring price of $2,039. This compared to $1,974 for the cheapest Falcon four-door and $2,043 for the least-expensive Valiant -- or $1,565 for a 1960 Volkswagen Beetle.

The Corvair's performance was adequate: 0-60 mph (0-97 kph) required between 17 and 18 seconds, the quarter mile (402 meters) a little over 21 seconds. Ultimate top speed was around 85 mph (137 kph). While no ball of fire, it was comparable to its Ford and Chrysler rivals, and a fair bit quicker than a a contemporary Volkswagen, which needed more than 27 seconds to hit 60 mph (97 kph). The Corvair's fuel economy was not at the level of the Volkswagen, averaging around 20 mpg  (11.8 L/100 km) in mixed driving, perhaps 25 mpg (9.4 L/100 km) in gentle freeway cruising. In compensation, it could seat six adults in only moderate discomfort. Compared to a Beetle or other small European import, this was not a bad deal.

Where the Corvair's case weakened was on the inside. With so much money invested under the skin, the base Corvair (dubbed "500") had a decidedly shabby level of interior trim: gray vinyl upholstery, gray-painted metal trim, and black rubber floor mats. The base Falcon and Valiant V100 were certainly Spartan, but the Corvair's designers had clearly saved money in areas that were very obvious to even casual shoppers. The rear-engine layout, meanwhile, proved to be a mixed blessing when it came to packaging efficiency. Although the lack of a space-robbing driveshaft tunnel helped to give the Corvair better headroom than the Falcon or Valiant, despite being somewhat lower overall, the fact that luggage had to be stored in the short, low-slung nose gave it less than half the trunk space of its competitors. The Corvair's engineering novelty won it Motor Trend's Car of the Year award for 1960, but its unconventional engineering offered buyers no clear advantage over its more conventional rivals.

It was no surprise, therefore, that in 1960, the Falcon outsold both the Corvair and the Valiant by a significant margin. The Corvair did outsell the Valiant, largely because buyers were less than enthralled with the Plymouth's oddball styling, but for a Chevrolet to fail to beat its direct Ford rival was a reversal of the usual order of things. Even before the first-year numbers were in, Chevrolet management launched a crash program to develop a new, far more conventional Falcon-fighter, which bowed for 1962 as the Chevy II.

The question became what to do with the Corvair. Although it hadn't proven to be the runaway hit Chevrolet had hoped, it was far from a complete sales disaster. Its development and tooling costs had been substantial, and a host of minor revisions had already been made for the '61 models; there would be no dumping unsold cars in the lake this time around. Perhaps what it needed was a new direction.

Chevrolet found its answer in May 1960, late in the initial model year, when it introduced the sporty Corvair Monza 900 coupe. The Monza, which cost a fairly hefty $189 more than the mid-level Corvair 700, had a more powerful engine with 95 gross horsepower (71 kW), along with an upgraded interior with bucket seats and better upholstery. The Monza may have been more expensive than its plebeian brothers, but it upgraded the interior ambiance considerably. The more powerful engine, meanwhile, chopped about three seconds off its 0-60 mph (0-97 kph) times, even more with the optional four-speed manual, and it still returned good fuel economy. Despite its higher price tag, the Monza quickly became the best-selling model in the line.

Thanks to the Monza, the Corvair's total sales for 1961, its second model year, were up by nearly 50%. About two-thirds of all Corvairs sold in 1961 were Monzas, which now included a four-door sedan, as well as the initial two-door coupe. The sedan and coupe were joined for 1962 by a convertible and even a wagon. (The latter proved a miscalculation; only 2,362 were sold, and the Monza wagon was dropped after that single year.) Buyers may have been skeptical about the Corvair as an economy car, but as a sporty coupe or pseudo-sports sedan, it looked like Chevy was onto something.


Ned Nickles led the styling development of the original Corvair. It looks best in two-door, pillared coupe form, with its sleek roofline. It's easy to understand why the Monza coupe was the best-selling Corvair model by a significant margin.

Marring the success of the Monza, however, were the lingering consequences of the last-minute cost-cutting program. They would nearly prove to be the Corvair's undoing.

The early Corvair was, as you would expect with its engine and transmission behind the rear axle, exceptionally tail-heavy. Add air conditioning, heater, automatic, and a full load of accessories, and its static weight distribution was close to 36/64, compared to about 55/45 for a typical front-engine car of its era. This was wonderful for traction in snow, but not so beneficial to straight-line stability, particularly in crosswinds, and it did nothing for handling at the limits of traction.

Tail-heavy cars are inherently prone to oversteer -- that is, the rear wheels tend to lose traction first in tight turns, sending the tail sliding outward. On rear-engined cars, this is exacerbated by the stiffer springs necessary to support the rear-end weight, which increases the weight transfer to the outside rear wheel. Oversteer is not inherently dangerous, and, in fairness, most every front-engined, rear-drive car of the era would oversteer if given too much throttle while exiting a turn. Unfortunately, correcting oversteer requires more skill than the average driver necessarily possess.

What the Corvair needed -- and had, in its original design -- was a front anti-roll bar. An anti-roll bar is a transversely mounted torsion-bar spring whose function is to increase roll stiffness. Adding one to the front suspension induces understeer (a tendency for the front wheels to lose traction first), and would have served to balance the Corvair's inherent propensity for oversteer. Alas, the anti-roll bar, which cost about $4 a car, was a casualty of the cost-cutting program, despite the vehement protests of Ed Cole and other Chevrolet engineers. As a cheaper stopgap measure, the Corvair's owner's manual specified unequal tire pressures, 15 psi (1.03 bar) in front, 26 psi (1.79 bar) in back; lower tire pressure reduces tire grip, which in this case served to promote understeer. Unfortunately, many owners ignored the manual and simply used equal pressures all around, like a normal car. Even if they did follow the recommendation, it was hardly a good solution. Lowering a tire's pressure also reduce its load capacity, so using the recommended pressures could cause a heavily loaded Corvair (which carried its luggage in the front) to overload its front tires, a potentially dangerous condition in itself.


In an era of phony vents, the slots on the Corvair's decklid were functional, playing a vital role in engine cooling. Even so, their placement was dictated by styling, not engineering -- the fact that they happened to be positioned correctly for cooling purposes was a happy accident.

The Corvair's most serious handling deficiency was not oversteer per se, but an separate, unfortunate consequence of its swing-axle rear suspension. In a swing-axle design, the rear half-shafts are pivoted at the transmission, allowing the wheels to move up and down, while still transmitting power. Unfortunately, in hard turns, the forces generated by the inside rear tire cause the halfshaft to act as a lever, hoisting the body upward, an effect known as jacking. As the body rises, it shifts weight off the inside wheel, allowing it to tuck under the body, breaking the already tenuous contact between tread and pavement. This tuck-under causes severe oversteer, not a gradual breakaway, but a sudden, vicious snap towards the outside of the turn that can be difficult for even skilled drivers to correct. The Corvair's defenders insist that the conditions necessary to provoke this effect were rare, but a significant number of early Corvair owners lost control in exactly this fashion, and subsequently launched a raft of lawsuits against General Motors.


The Corvair's handling infirmities were shared by other swing-axle cars, like the VW Beetle and the "Gullwing" Mercedes 300SL, although by this time Mercedes had taken steps to combat the worst effects. Independently suspended sixties cars like the Jaguar E-Type and Corvette Sting Ray minimized the jacking effect and the swing axle's radical camber changes by using multiple links and control arms to control wheel travel, although this was bulkier and more expensive.

By 1963, these lawsuits had reached the attention of a young attorney named Ralph Nader. Nader saw the Corvair as a prime example of an auto industry that put costs ahead of safety, and the eventual revelation that GM had omitted the vital front anti-roll bar to save a few dollars only served to make his point. Nader saw the makings of a cause célèbre, which he exploited in a 1965 book entitled Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. The first chapter of that book, "The Corvair Story," was simultaneously published in the November 1965 issue of The Nation. Nader's book became a rallying cry that was quickly picked up by politically minded people like New York State Senator Edward Speno and Dr. William Haddon, Jr., head of the New York Department of Public Health. It became the spark that ignited a public crusade for legislative standards for automotive safety. Nader's cause was inadvertently aided by GM itself, which hired private investigators to follow him, hoping to find enough dirt to coerce him into backing off. Not only did they find nothing -- Nader led a practically monastic existence -- their investigation later came to light, forcing them to make an embarrassing public apology that validated Nader's image as a modern-day David fighting a corporate Goliath.

Even before the safety debate emerged, Chevrolet had made some gradual steps towards addressing the Corvair's handling problems. For the 1962 model year, a heavy-duty suspension option became available, which added a front anti-roll bar, as well as limiting straps on the rear swing arms to restrict their more radical camber changes. This was not a complete solution, but it took the teeth out of the snappish tail. The package was an extra-cost option in '62 and '63, and finally became standard in 1964. Also in '64, a transverse leaf spring (known as a camber compensator) was added to the rear suspension. The leaf spring served to support part of the weight of the tail, allowing the normal springs to be softened, with a consequent reduction in the propensity to oversteer. The '64 Corvair's handling was still not perfect, but it was improved to the point where it was no more treacherous in most conditions than other American passenger cars of its time.


The front-end styling is the only reliable way to distinguish the year of a first-generation Corvair; Chevy shuffled the trim every year. This is a 1961 Monza, which had 102 hp (76 kW).

As Chevrolet worked to sort out the handling issues, the Corvair's straight-line performance received a significant boost with the introduction of the turbocharged Monza Spyder in 1962. This was only the second turbocharged engine ever offered in a production car; the first was the Oldsmobile Jetfire, introduced a few months earlier. The Spyder package was expensive, at $317.45, but it bumped the Monza engine to 150 gross horsepower (112 kW). The turbocharged engine had a fairly narrow power band, so it was not quite as fast in the real world as its specifications implied, but it did trim 0-60 mph (0-97 kph) times to less than 12 seconds, and pushed top speed to about 110 mph (176 kph). In May 1963, Car and Driver dubbed it a "Poor Man's Porsche," and its performance wasn't too far off from that of a Porsche 356 Super 90, at about half the price. Meanwhile, by 1964 the standard Monza engine had been stroked to 164 cubic inches (2.7L) and 110 hp (82 kW), which was enough to go from 0 to 60 mph (97 kph) in a respectable 14 seconds, with a top speed of nearly 100 mph (160 kph).


This decklid badge signified the motive power of the Spyder -- the Monza's standard engine was fitted with a single carburetor and a 3.0-in (76-mm) diameter turbocharger, making a maximum of about 10 pounds (0.69 bar) of boost. Unlike the more complex Olds Jetfire, Chevy simply reduced the compression ratio by a full point to avoid detonation, which cost a certain amount of power at lower speeds. In compensation, it proved far more reliable than the Olds engine.

The Corvair was completely redesigned for 1965. Under curvaceous new styling, the original handling problems were decisively addressed with an entirely new rear suspension, similar in design to the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. (The main deviation from Sting Ray practice was the use of coil springs in place of the Corvette's transverse leaf.) The rear half shafts were still hinged at the transaxle, but lower control arms and toe-control lateral links were added to provide better wheel control, avoiding the radical camber changes that plagued the early cars. Reviewers unanimously agreed that handling was vastly improved. The unexpected tail slides were now a thing of the past, and testers found it difficult to provoke oversteer without considerable, deliberate effort. The new Corvair was well-balanced and quite nimble, further aided by a quicker steering ratio that made corrections much easier than before.


Ron Hill's styling team was responsible for the completely restyled '65 Corvair, one of the prettiest cars GM ever built. It was still clearly a Corvair, but far sleeker than its predecessor. It was 3.3 inches (84 mm) longer than the '64, on the same wheelbase, and weighed only a little bit more.

The Spyder was replaced by a new model called Corsa, which had a new engine option (also available on Monzas), featuring four carburetors (the only factory-optional four-carb engine in any postwar American car) and 140 gross horsepower (104 kW). Top option remained a turbocharged engine, which now claimed 180 hp (134 kW). The turbocharged Corsa could now reach 60 mph (97 kph) in 10 seconds or less, and Chevrolet claimed a top speed of close to 120 mph (192 kph). Despite the extra power, highway mileage could still easily top 20 mpg (11.8 L/100 km), as good as any American compact of its era.

This car is a '66 Monza, equipped with the four-carb engine that was standard on Corsas. It was rated 140 gross hp (104 kW) and 160 lb-ft (216 N-m) of torque. The "radiator" behind the engine is actually the condenser for this car's factory air conditioning.

With gorgeous styling, superb handling, improved brakes, good fuel economy, and enough power to satisfy all but the drag-racing fringe, the new Corvair should have been a massive hit. '65 sales were indeed up, by a modest 14% over '64, but the game had changed. There was a new player now: the Ford Mustang, which was about the same size as the Corvair, but conventionally engineered and available with V8 engines that could vacuum the doors off even a turbocharged Corvair.

At first, GM management thought the Mustang would be a niche product, no match for the redesigned Monza and Corsa, but it quickly became clear that the reverse was true. When first-year Mustang sales crossed the half-million mark, Chevy decided the Corvair was finished. The word went out to engineering that the car was to receive only whatever minimal changes were necessary to meet federal requirements. No more styling or major mechanical changes would be permitted, and the marketing budget evaporated. Meanwhile the corporation dusted off plans for a sporty-car version of the conventional Chevy II/Nova, which eventually emerged as the 1967 Camaro.


The '65 Corvair was a strong styling influence on the Camaro -- which was styled by the same team -- although the Camaro adopted the more fashionable long-hood/short-deck look. The 1967-1969 Plymouth Barracuda hardtop also seems to owe a debt to this car in its shape and proportions.

The second-generation Corvair was left to die of neglect. The turbocharged engine was dropped after 1966, and the 140-hp (104-kW) engine was briefly cut, as well, although customer demand subsequently restored it to the line-up for 1968. The few testers who tried these late Corvairs found assembly quality poor, another sign of corporate disdain.

Left without support, the Corvair bled to death, finally ending production in May 1969. Total sales for the decade-long run were about 1.8 million, a more-than-respectable sum by any standards other than GM's. Ironically, less than five years after its demise, Ed Cole, now GM president, remarked that if he still had the Corvair, he could have sold every one he could build. Instead, when buyers shifted again to compact imports in the late sixties and early seventies, GM was caught flat-footed. Their response was the Vega, which proved to be nearly as ill-starred (no pun intended) as the Corvair, albeit in different ways.

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