<VV> Corvair - Will it EVER end? Now Time magazine spews...

[Rodney Spooner]

Time magazine, the ultimate automotive authority, weighed in with their piece de’ resistance, “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time.” Still no honorable mention of the U.S. Government’s NTHSA reports.
   
  1899-2007
  The 50 Worst Cars of All Time
  On the 50th anniversary of the Ford Edsel, TIME and Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive critic and syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, look at the greatest lemons of the automotive industry 
  “Rear-engine cars are fun to drive and even more fun to crash. While rear-engine packaging offers enormous advantages, putting the vehicle's heaviest component behind the rear axle gives cars a distinct tendency to spin out, sort of like an arrow weighted at the end. During World War II, Nazi officers in occupied Czechoslovakia were banned from driving the speedy rear-engined Tatras because so many had been killed behind the wheel. Chevrolet execs knew the Corvair — a lithe and lovely car with an air-cooled, flat-six in the back, a la the VW Beetle — was a handful, but they declined to spend the few dollars per car to make the swing-axle rear suspension more manageable. Ohhh, they came to regret that. Ralph Nader put the smackdown on GM in his book Unsafe at Any Speed, also noting that the Corvair's single-piece steering column could impale the driver in a front collision. Ouch! Meanwhile, the Corvair had other problems. It leaked oil like a derelict tanker. Its heating
 system tended to pump noxious fumes into the cabin. 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. Even so, my family had a Corvair, white with red interior, and we loved it.”
  Unlike many of the other regurgitations, TM compares the Corvair to some very outrageously interesting examples of automotive engineering.
  For complete TM article visit:
  http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/completelist/0,,1658545,00.html
  I’m always curiously amazed when people compare the 6-cylinder Corvair to VW but never the Porsche. But the WWII German TATRAS??? That’s a new one.
   Vairy truly yours,
  Rodney Spooner