<VV> Corvair in Print

[corvairs]

Thanks Bob! PJ is one of my favorite writers, ever since his days at the 
National Lampoon. The  surprise is two full paragraphs and not one 
obscenity.......Lon


Robert Marlow wrote:
> 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]
>
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