<VV> Corvair in Print

[Robert Marlow]

Excerpt from P.J. O'Rourke's new book, /Driving Like Crazy/:

I take the demise of the American car personally. I'm looking around 
furiously for someone or something to blame. Ralph Nader for instance. 
What fun it would be to jump on him with both feet and send the pink 
Marxist goo squirting out of his cracked egghead. And let's definitely 
do that even though Ralph is seventy-five and insane. But it took more 
than one man and his ignorant and ill-written book /Unsafe at Any Speed/ 
to wreck the most important industry in the nation. (My high school 
girlfriend Connie had a Corvair. Connie was the worst driver in the 
world -- and one of the fastest. If Connie couldn't get that 
rear-engine, swing-axle setup to spin out and flip, nobody could.)

American car designers and engineers are supposedly at fault because 
American cars fell behind foreign cars in sophistication of design and 
engineering. American cars fell especially behind during the 1960s era 
of chrome and tailfin excess that car-hating Volvo-butts still like to 
natter on about. Too much jogging has addled their brains. There's 
little chrome and barely a fin to be seen on American cars after 1960, 
excepting the modest lark tails on Cadillac rear fenders and the shark 
attack of the 1961 Chryslers. In fact, early '60s American cars exhibit 
some of the cleanest, crispest, most restrained lines in automotive 
design history-the 1962 Lincoln Continental; the Avanti; the last of the 
Studebaker Hawks; the 1964 Buick Electra, Oldsmobile 98, and Pontiac 
Grand Prix hardtops; the 1965 Buick Riviera; those maligned Corvairs, 
including the Corvair Greenbrier precursor to the minivan; Mustangs; the 
1965 Pontiac GTO and similar early muscle cars; and the 1964 Rambler 
American sedan in its own oddball way. Then, when it comes to 
down-and-dirty, gnarly, totally unrestrained lines, there's the Corvette 
Stingray.

[end of excerpt]