Corvair

This morning’s dream (Friday, March 28, 2008) was about my black ‘61 Corvair Monza coupe, the first real car I ever owned.
(My first car is The Beast: a 1958 Triumph fish-mouth TR3 [in 1966]; but it was a toy, not a normal means of transport. It’s weather-protection was minimal; I usually drove it top down [rain or shine].)
The Corvair was the pinnacle of General Motors engineering — a better Porsche than even Porsche.
Aluminum air-cooled motor in the back, and flat as a pancake — i.e. totally unrelated to anything else GM was building (except perhaps the valve-train, which was the same design as the Small-Block).
I am especially partial to the second iteration (‘65-‘69). They have fully-independent rear suspension, as opposed to swing-axles like the first Corvairs.
My ‘61 was the first iteration, and only had two flaws endemic to the design.
The motor in the rear made it feel tail-happy and unbalanced. I felt like I was driving a pendulum.
The swing-axles also liked to get all crossed up.
Roll the car into a corner, and the inside axle could cock, throwing tire-contact on the side of the casing, and minimizing its size.
It was a flaw on which Ralph Nader made his reputation, although you had to be really moving for this to happen.
Nader was claiming this would happen to Granny at slow speed.
It also sold a lot of camber-compensators: a single-leaf spring that tied the swing-axles flat in a corner. In fact the 1964 Corvair had one stock from the factory. (Nader went bonkers.)
My Corvair also had problems specific to the car. It had the two-speed PowerGlide automatic, and it would drop into Low at the drop of a hat; revving the poor motor into the stratosphere.
Looking back, I’m inclined to think a tranny mechanic could reset that thing to not do that. —Our buses were like that: some shifted at 20 mph; others not ever. A tranny mechanic could make it shift at 35 mph, like it was supposed to.
But I thought the tranny was sick. Once the car crippled, and O’Connor Chevrolet dropped the while drivetrain. They claimed the diff had filled with ATF. —I’m more inclined to think the cable shifter had broke. Years later I coulda fixed that myself.
Another factor was at play: namely that PowerGlide was not my choice. I had looked at four-on-the-floor Corvairs, but my father had found this one. And he wasn’t about to cosign a four-on-the-floor.
The import of the dream was that the Corvair was still a great car.
Compared to what’s available now, the only things lacking were good tires and good brakes.
In 1961 cars were still on bias-ply tires; nowhere near as good as the radials you find today.
And as I was driving along, the brakes were wimpy. The Corvair still had drum-brakes. It took a lot to slow the car.
But on the other hand I felt like I was driving as good as it gets. Slam on the brakes in our CR-V and the rear locks up. It doesn’t have anti-lock brakes, but I’ve always felt anti-lock brakes were just a band-aid for poor balance. Slam on the brakes in the Bathtub and nothing locks — it’s balanced.
Our Faithful Hunda was like that: fantastic brake-balance.
But compared to a Corvair it feels like later cars were heavily finessed to hide their flaws.
After all, you can engineer stability into an unstable design.
But the Corvair was an excellent design — and my dream substantiated this. I still had it (had never traded it), and it felt as good as current designs.

The Chevrolet “Small-Block” V8 was introduced at 265 cubic-inches displacement in the 1955 model-year. It continued production for years, first at 283 cubic inches, then 327, then 350. Other displacements were also manufactured.

“PowerGlide” is the automatic-transmission Chevrolet introduced in 1950.

RE: “Our buses were like that......” —For 16&1/2 years I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.

“Diff” equals differential; “ATF” equals automatic-transmission fluid.

“Four-on-the-floor” is a four-speed floor-shifted standard transmission; a sporting option.

RE: “The Corvair still had drum-brakes......” —Most cars now have disc brakes; much better because they don’t expand away from the braking medium like drum-brakes.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

“The Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s large and white and like sitting in a bathtub.

“The Faithful Hunda” is our 1989 Honda Civic All-Wheel-Drive station-wagon, by far the BEST car we ever owned, now departed (replaced by our 2003 Honda CR-V). (Called a “Hunda” because that was how a fellow bus-driver at Transit [Regional-Transit-Service in Rochester, where I once worked] pronounced it.)