<VV> Car History Question -- Some Corvair

[kenpepke at juno.com]

"I find this history stuff fascinating..."  Bill Hershkowitz

Me too BUT, time has a strange way of both rewriting and deleting history. [Tell me about it :-)]  Read lots of interesting points posted on this subject.  It is easy to see both the perception history and economy has changed over the years.  One reoccurring theme revolves around 'cheap fuel prices' and gas mileage.  Uh, YES, people were interested in BOTH.  Anybody remember the MOBILEgas Economy runs?  [side note:  Overall win by a Chevrolet 409 4 speed in 62?  Corvair did not do all that well :-(]  At 25 cents per gallon gas is cheap in today's money ... not so cheap in the money back then.  

A good dependable used car for $100 was not all that cheap to a family person that made $35 per week!  And a $4 fill up was a purchase to be carefully considered.  Just going for a pleasure drive was pretty much limited to Sunday afternoon.  Today gas at $2.50 is cheaper than 1950 prices.  Better to compare hours worked.  In 1950 the average new car cost the average family about 85% of a years wage.  By the first of the 70s that cost had dropped to about 27% and had steadily risen to somewhere around 47% in the early 90s.  I have not seen that figure published since then.  The interesting thing there is what the 'average' car was in their own time.  [The 1950 average vehicle featured NO power steering, brakes, automatics, radio, power windows and on and on.]  Economy cars were mostly inline 6 cylinder 3 speed manual transmission with overdrive.

Foreign cars were not really that much of a factor, that includes VW, until the later 60s even though it is often said those VW sales figures were the birth of the Corvair.  I am not so sure that was the real case but they all satisfied the 'ding-a-ling' market ... as did the Corvair.  And the sales of the EM pretty well saturated that market.  People are always telling us that Mr Nader was responsible for the demise of the Corvair but the sales figures shows without a doubt that the market was satisfied long before that notorious book was published.  Chevy II, Lark, Falcon, Valiant etc. were conventional cars of a somewhat smaller size that, all on their own, spawned a new attitude in the driving public.

Ken P


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"Bill H." <gojoe283 at yahoo.com> wrote:

It was posited on this board that there were many older cars that could be bought for 
cheap in the late 1950s...VERY cheap.  Of tne cars that seemed to be mechanically 
bulletproof in those days would have been the Plymouths and Chryslers of the late 40s.  
Those old flathead sixes went to hell and back, and many turned over more than once.

Being a young boy back in '58, but having a Dad who was a car nut, I can tell you that 
those old MoPars soldiered on forever.  Fords fell apart after only a few years of use, 
although the flathead V8 earned a good reputation for being easy to "hop up."  
Chevys were durable, but those Stovebolts did start to burn oil before their decade was 
over.

It's true that smaller cars were not very very popular before 1958.  "Bigger is 
Better" was the motto, but a nasty recession that year turned finicky buyers to 
Ramblers and yes, VW bugs.  Companies trying to hawk the battleships were using axles 
with higher numerical ratios to squeeze more miles out of each drop of high-test gas.  I 
remember seeing a number of Renault Dauphines in those years, a rear-engine air cooled 
competitor for the Bug.  Back then, anyone who drove something that was made on the other 
side of the Atlantic was looked at as a "kook."  "Why doesn't he drive a 
REAL car?", was the question I heard from my folks and their friends.

The Big Three saw '58 Rambler sales taking off, especially the new American (which was 
simply a rehashed '50 Nash Rambler), and rushed to the drawing board, knowing that their 
behemoths were getting so big and plush, that sales resistance to these cars would come 
naturally, in direct proportion to the increases in wheelbase and cubic inches of the 
"standard" cars.

The Lark kept Studebaker on life support for a few years, while the Packard died with 
sales dwindling to next to nothing.  

The writing was on the wall...as we all know, sales of smaller cars began to take off in 
a big way starting around that recession year of 1958.

It's interesting to note that as early as 1953, Consumer Reports objected to the bigger, 
faster cars coming out of Detroit, and gave high marks to the Aero Willys and the Nash 
Rambler that year.  A subscriber asked CR if they would road-test the Rover, which was 
apparently a $2,800 car (an outrageous sum in those days) in the compact class, but 
highly trimmed.  

I was 6 when the '60 Corvair came out.  I was disappointed in the style and wondered why 
there was no convertible or hardtop coupe.  But, none of the other compacts had hardtops, 
either.  Lark got one in '61, followed by Valiant the same year.  Nova got one at the 
outset, and Falcon got one for '63.  Rambler American got one also in, I think 1961 or 
62.  

And when the '65 Corvair came out, none of them came close to the Vair in the styling 
department.  Just my two cents.

I find this history stuff fascinating...

Bill Hershkowitz 69 Monza 110 PG   

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