<VV> Corvair / Porsche / V W

[NicolCS at aol.com]

Steve, here's what Bob Benzinger (Corvair engine designer) said on this topic:

"I'm often asked how much help we got from VW and Porsche. And sometimes 
asked this by people who firmly believe that Herr Doctor himself designed the 
vehicle, the engine, the whole shot. Actually, the truth is that zero help came 
from Porsche or VW. Nothing from advice and council - really the secrecy of the 
project forbid it. And anything like that, the cat would have been out of the 
bag in a hurry, with this kind of advice or council or engineering 
consultation, if you will. And really very little help from copying hardware. These two 
vehicles of course were useful to a degree by showing several things: first 
from Porsche, that a reasonable performance could be achieved out of this kind of 
an arrangement. And the confidence out of VW that it could be done in volume. 
Now if we get Porsche's performance and VW's volume, then we've got it. And 
of course these engines were also useful -the whole vehicles in fact were 
useful - as a baseline or reference. In the case of the engine, things like the 
temperature, the performance level, (and) some of the manufacturing techniques 
were useful for reference purposes. The Porsche, I think that you would suspect, 
was the more useful of the two. The VW was just plain too conservative; and 
forgive the expression, a bit crude."

Read the full speech at: http://www.vv.corvair.org/Library/benzinger.htm

Craig Nicol